When Brisling slipped back out of view, inside his little cubicle, the noisy chair he was sitting on squeaked a protest, and the computer screen was suddenly eclipsed by his wide frame. The breath came out of Brisling's throat as if a huge impeller had thrust it upward. Even that very morning it had come that way, after Valerie had yelled, "Malcolm, I know you hate your job, but you have to get up. It's time for work."
He knew it all again, every line of it, every mark and scar of it, as he saw Marquis go by and especially noted the way the boss's head hung over in another kind of remark, and the hands clasped behind his back the way referees stand by their calls, administrators at their task. Marquis's never been able to hide his feelings from me, Brisling thought. Nor Valerie her's. A swift sense of disloyalty swept through him and he wondered if his face had reddened deeply. He felt it had, but there were the revelations accosting him, besetting him. They had to count for something.
And then, from over the cubicle wall, he saw the smug look on Appleyard's face, and the manner in which Appleyard, a peer in a sense, saluted the boss's words. It was the nearly indifferent way one shoulder rose in the slightest inflection, almost like a stifled cough stuffed away for a moment. Like an open book, he thought, this Appleyard, who wants the district manager's job any way he can get it.
Appleyard was his junior by ten years; he was thirty, handsome in a pretty way, too much so for Brisling who noted the pompadour of hair, the elegance of tie and perfection of collar, suit pants with an impeccable press. Brisling had long ago read Appleyard's hands, his arms too even at rest but the way they touched on solid things, how he locked one knee against the other when in doubt of answers. At length he assessed, decided, and agreed that Appleyard's pressure points were his knees, especially the right one. Though ladies flocked around Appleyard, around him on the dance floor, around his MG as red as a lit firecracker, they were the few people Brisling didn't trust, neither them nor their borne assessments. And never Valerie or Hiltzie, he added to that category, thinking, they're a pair in their own right. I wonder if they can see the things I see. The computer screen changed color as a crackling began in a static call. It made him think of old radios, the way the computer began to click away, old sensations holding sway, old knowledge asserting itself.
Moments later Brisling saw Marquis at the end of the hall talking to his secretary, Hiltzie, and it was as if his own ear was right there, the way Marquis' hands moved in quick little circles, and the way he stood with his shoulder pointing back down the hall, and how he leaned a bit too close to those marvelous breasts everybody stared at, an elbow reaching for a lifebelt, a hand stretching for the universe. Hiltzie in a dark brown sweater. Brisling puffed a small laugh; Marquis trying to pull the wool over her eyes. Strange how it is, these things I see I can also hear. Then he added the full interpretation, the words he knew he could hear from a mere stance: Old Brisling back there is at it again, screwing up as usual. Good thing I'm a kind-hearted man, Hiltzie, my dear, keeping him on. It's the way I'm made. You can trust me to that.
And the next morning, sleep a half-dark happiness where words were never spoken, Valerie nudged him again. He saw her shoulders shrug, saw her mouth screwed up as if to say something else, but he had seen that look before. She had had her say the day before. She shook him lightly. Her hand was warm. He managed a smile, a half smile. She nodded her assent. There was a smile at the corner of her lips. A hip moved slightly out of line, so very slightly yet so pronounced. A breath held itself someplace. Tonight there'd be hell to pay between the sheets. Notes had been taken.
Halfway to work he heard the fire engine sirens and klaxons behind him. He pulled over just as the driver behind him roared around him and down the road, racing the engine to the next intersection. I hope he crashes, Brisling said to himself. His own car rubbed its tires against the curbing. Then fire engines, three of them, lights flashing, sirens blaring, horns honking the bejayzus out of morning, rushed by him. Almost forty minutes later, traffic tied up in every radius from a huge factory and warehouse fire, Brisling managed to get to an observation point across from a crowd of spectators. He swore he could smell a host of aromas and odors; after-shave lotion, sometimes cute and sometimes overpowering perfume expecting to simmer down before the office was reached, and the fearful sense of fire at its work.
Smoke billowed into the air, much of it rising directly overhead as if in a shaft, driven up by the heat of the flames. The stench of burning tar and shingles broke on top of all other smells. All of it made Brisling shiver.
There was a man suddenly standing beside him, tall, in a work jacket, denim and corduroy trim, breathing lightly, perhaps after a small sprint. "Humdinger, isn't it," the man said. He did not look at Brisling but was looking across the street at the crowd spread all along one sidewalk. There must have been a hundred people in the crowd.
"I think it's very frightening," Brisling said. His briefcase was in his hand. He had not dared leave it in the car. "It's a hard way to begin the day. I'm sure those guys don't like it." He pointed to the firemen now working off a host of engines. Some of the engines were yellow and he assessed they had been called from out of the district. At least out of town. That too was a message to be read. All that was to be read was not locked on top of the printed page.
"You're right on that, pal," the man said. "I guess I can trust you. I'm one of them. I'm looking the crowd over. We think this one was set. See anyone suspicious?" He kept his eyes on the opposite walk, moving his gaze up and down the line of spectators. "I hope he gives himself away. We had two guys lucky enough to get out alive. But they figure it was set."
Brisling looked over at the crowd, not forty feet away. He was thinking of Marquis and Appleyard, and the way Valerie could say yes without saying it, and Hiltzie could say no without saying it either. If he quit his job, there'd be no place to go. He couldn't do that to Valerie. Just suck it up, pal, was all he could muster.
The smoke smell seemed to fall down on top of his head. Too, there was a momentary sense of heat. It had a guttural sensation plunging with it. A raw odor crawled up his nose; he sensed heat rather than feeling the tongues of it. He felt open and accessible. The way his life was.
Malcolm Brisling, nerd and nice guy, practically finishing last in all things, except with Valerie, and he knew not why, began to stare into the eyes of the people watching the fire. Now and then some of them looked at him and the man standing beside him, and then they looked at other activities in the fire area. Smoke swirled its oblivious ways into the sky, layered out, was swept away. Early sun poked itself through small openings. Brisling thought of looking into the inert portions of a diamond, the luster and lack-luster the good eye could find.
And then, unobtrusively, by the chances that come along in life when one is opened and opening wider, accessible, inquisitive, he saw in one man opposite him the shift of eyes, the twist of head, the way one shoulder tried to fling darkness across his face without asking the hands to do the hiding, the masking. He noted the man's raiment, the baseball cap, the shiny windbreaker, the slack line of his jaw, the mouth agape, and the pair of hands clutching themselves at his waist in a kind of prayer of thanksgiving. Marquis came back to him at the end of the corridor, silently talking away. The tongues of men, he said to himself, are at my ears.
Brisling never really knew why he said it. "Sir," he said, "not that I am trying to do your job, but I wish you'd do me a favor." He didn't believe he was saying this to some supposedly secret member of the city fire department and yet a perfect stranger until moments earlier.
"What is that favor, mister? By the way, what's your name?" He had not taken his eyes off the group of spectators.
"My name is Malcolm Brisling. I work at Marquis and Sons. I live on Middlestone Ave."
"What's the favor, Mr. Brisling? I'm Lieutenant Hardiman." The lieutenant's eyes had not left the crowd. He did not offer his hand in a handshake, nor did he flinch when a huge section of wall, with a groan and a gasp of hot air, fell into the fire.
"If you have no definite course of action, sir, I wish you'd check that man in the baseball cap and the shiny green windbreaker. The one in the middle of the crowd. His body language, for the want of other words, is really strange to me." He felt awful saying it. He could get some innocent person put in jail, or himself if things spun the wrong way. And they could do just that. Life could be so unfair at times, and so open, he could hear himself say under his breath.
"You serious, Mr. Brisling?"
"I am."
It hit the papers in the morning, in the headlines: Spectator finds arsonist. Body language giveaway.
Marquis was different in work the next day. Appleyard was different. Work was almost a joy. Brisling thought some of his coworkers, and the boss, were walking differently, saying less.
Later in the week, a policeman friend of Lt. Hardiman's, Inspector Noel Rebeneker, asked him to come down to the station to watch a routine line-up go through its moves. From behind a one-way mirror, though frightened down to his toes, Malcolm Brisling pegged the guilty party in ten seconds. That made the headlines, too.
The next morning Valerie said yes without him asking. Hiltzie, in her own way, said yes also. But Malcolm Brisling thought that life was sweet enough, though he did like to watch Hiltzie when she stretched at her desk, the brown sweater moving, the wool threatening to pull itself over her eyes. He did not tell Valerie about his possibilities or how Marquis had started to walk on eggshells.
39 Stone
You gave all of us names,
out of your presumptive fiction,
from baseball statistics,
organic names out of Byron's
Unpublished poems as you called them,
from a freak spin on the basketball court
when the ball tipped in off Tutu's fingertips.
We come now called and bidden
to share your leaving us, daring us
to be civil in the whole matter, still
laughing up your sleeve about all this clap-
trap and silly ties and jackets on a hot night
when you know your veins are cool
and glacier-slow.
All of us you'd fool,
you said, slipping out of bounds
before we'd even know, leaving camp
when we would least notice the huge emptiness
you somehow carried for years in your back pocket
like an unexpended plug of tobacco.
You knew something we didn't.
The walls are made of speech.
your nouns and names sound like posters
having voice. More than one of us thinks
you might sit up and laugh before the night's
over, before we close down the fragile cherrywood
lid, the ticket finally punched, you said,
a Boston & Maine conductor taking tally.
Myself, I thought you'd never go,
knowing basketball and Baudelaire,
too full of the sense of imagery at hand,
the cautions of similes and other like tastes,
too brave to call when pain tore like blowouts
through your heart. This is about those named,
39 Stone. They'll know.
Cutting Ice on Rapid Tucker's Pond
It was always horses, dragging ice
to the wooden ramp obeying chugs
of the gasoline engine, their traces
often slack as the ice slid on ice
and thundered slowly and resolutely
from hard shore to hard shore. Up the
ramp the ice cakes lumbered, six feet
of Arctic beauty before the huge saw
found the blue and silver-red signals
sitting just under cover and waiting
to flash once more before sawdust
poured down on their frantic coloring.
I have no hard memory of the men
who steamed their labors on the hard pond,
who swore and drank coffee from bottles
whiskey belonged in, who went gloveless
and carefree and irreverent to winter.
Of their faces I have no memory, or names,
or how they spent their money downtown,
or where they trod for stitches when
the angry saw went haywire. I only know
they poled ice floes and huge cakes
with an indifferent touch, that they argued
long hours against the cold, the wind,
and the incessant need and desperate need
for sleep, that at zero degrees they mopped
brows with red kerchiefs large as sails.
They were the reverse itinerants
who came not for fruit but for ice drop,
who appeared one Saturday in December
and began to take away pieces of our pond,
huge rectangular chunks they hitched
up to horses shrouded wholly in steam,
their wide mouths rimmed by thick lips
often white with frost around the red tongues.
They wore soft felt hats, brimmed, jackets
so odd you could not find a mate, but boots
with horsehide laces, wide belts, and looked
westward where the sun would set part ways
through the afternoon.
In latest July, ever,
you could find December deep in the icehouse
under the waves of orange sawdust still wet
with some of their sweat, a cool hideaway
to puff the stub of a cigarette, touch a breast,
play hide and seek for hours as winter
sprawled under our feet cold and foreboding
and nearly two floors high inside redan walls
two feet thick.
Mostly I remember the eyes
of a horse who plunged through the ice,
like great dishes of fear, wide and frightened
and full of the utmost knowledge. His front
hooves slashed away at the ragged rim of ice,
but could not lift him out, or leather traces
or ropes or sixty feet of chain, and when he
went down, like a boat plunging, huge bubbles
burst on the surface and a December afternoon
became quiet.
We stood transfixed, as if frozen
in the gray of that day, the itinerant workers,
other horses at rest, my shod friends, as Rapid
Tucker's Pond began its disappearance under
the edge of yesterday.
Blue Lightning and A '33 Ford Touring Car
The old Ford presented itself
one Lover's Lane afternoon
as we cut through
No-Man's land,
stripped mostly of goods, the top
devious as umbrella in two winds,
canvas streamers lounging
stiff as subway straps.
We pledged its deliverance, recall,
and butt-worked half a daylight
hiding it under dim alders
along pond's cozy bank.
For weeks we scrounged odd parts,
plugs, wires, battery, gas in
pint cans, even a shod wheel
off Goldberg's junk wagon
parked outside Widow Minn's house,
a stringy threaded fan belt
donated by my unauthorizing
brother, ignition parts
from a grown confidant; until,
at the end, it seems,
of one glorious summer, it
stood spit and polished,
apt-looking, our road warrior,
corsair of the hot macadam,
ready for the breakdown cruise,
poised at catapult.
We marveled at its false gleam,
like the dawn before its dawn,
the not so taut canvas top
nailed to wooden ribs,
lines in the algae green paint
as if topographically applied,
the grill fashionable once
again, high noon silvering.
That old workhorse of an engine,
of course, never turned over,
never coughed once at prompting,
mute as an Inca in Mexico.
We could not fathom dark rains
swallowed by empty plug holes,
how its mystical alloys
and metals self-fused
tighter than a two-handed fist.
So one Saturday of October,
the bite beginning in air,
Earth rolling out sleep
blankets, we interred it with rites
under the ways of Lily Pond,
let it slip off the edge
like summer moves,
sleek, our dread Phaeton underway,
wearing weeks of polish, inept-
ness, a piece of each of us
at summer, at dreams
gone their ways, off and out and up,
sad for all the eye burn sweating,
sadder still when I wander here
under stars, pinned by light.
Once, in a foreign April, thermals
at great discord, a blue light
sank beneath the pond's face
and froze on a soft chassis.
In Soundless Defense
Tonight the stars
Are like nails
Hammered home
On black gauze.
Eyeless, my father
Rocks upon the porch
With the music of leather
Against a softer wood.
Now and then a creak
As apt as punctuation
As he turns seeking for sound
To identify.
I know there is no sound
From stars hammered home,
No sound at all
Even in sharp listening for,
And yet he hears
The sanctuary of stars.
Night Forgery
Just before dawn
a shadow makes tracks
in the dew-lit grass.
Later, a whisper
and a scent follow
the forsaken imprints
Not a leaf stirs,
but if I watch closely,
blades of grass ease upright,
a loam granule
is released to airs
staggering under stars,
and the whisper, vague,
is familiar, perhaps stripped
from gists of old conversations.
Years ago
at a Red Sox game I
became separated from my father.
All the goblins
of my young creation hung over
my hysteria, poked at my terror.
When he found me,
pawed, frayed, diminished,
he said he'd never leave me again.
This soft forging
in the night grass
is a kept word, a vow.