I'll Let You Go by Bruce Wagner

Author:Bruce Wagner [Wagner, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-112-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 29

Doggish Days

It has been written that after many a summer dies the swan, but plenty happens in the seasons preceding such a lyrical demise. To wit: the heavy-bodied bird must shed its feathers before finding a mate. That is what renders it flightless.

During most of his season, Will’m nested. Though he never ventured to Northern California, he did take the other half of his friend Fitz’s advice, trimming the wild oak tree of a beard close enough to skin so that it looked inadvertently modern (or nearly so). His accent too was shorn, the notes still melodious yet steeped in less juice; anachronisms came fewer and further between, while contemporary phrases and intonations grew like sprigs from pavement cracks. There was no explaining that. Our fugitive ruefully discarded his telltale tweeds and took to wearing a Smart & Final Iris windbreaker. He did not want for money, thanks to the deathbed bequest of the late, lamented Geo. Fitzsimmons; in the envelope that graced the blouse of the suicide lay $6,000, which Will’m did nothing to flaunt.

To what do we owe this transformation? That he was mindful of police and the continuous danger of his circumstances certainly did not explain all, for a larger part of him remained quixotic and incognizant of the threats of the world. On the streets, and with his toilet, he proved competent as always: only twice did he find himself significantly interviewed, each time by armed squadrons on horseback. Polite and sober-eyed throughout, still “in character”—but with the lambent fire of an actor more than midway through a very long run—Will’m refrained from the extemporaneous outbursts that were already so much a part of his past. In both instances, though he couldn’t produce sufficient I.D., he remained apologetic and unmolested, Santa Monica on the whole being indigent-friendly; the tanned, hairy-armed cops cantered off in search of nubile beachgoers committing misdemeanors.

How, then, to explain the mellowing?

He spent hours atop a Macy’s bath towel, burning his skin at the shore. The waves lapped relentlessly as is their wont; sunbathers lazed and sortied in pointillist ballet; dusk ushered in the nebulae. He imagined himself illustrated, a hero on a dead world that was tentatively beginning to flower again—saw himself standing tall under empyrean tempera of cloud-scudded sky, replete with William Morris’s beloved Arthurian garb, a gleaming, high-crested morion stuffed onto thickened head, with smoky visor and ventail, fat thighs squeezed into cuisses, wearing épaulières of rubies plucked from Saturn’s rings, sword and escutcheon raised against bottomless heavens filled with vessels of improbable size disgorging a-hundred-thousand-score armies of desperate, adventuresome men: celestial warriors! Will’m lay on the sand with his recumbent DNA and bore minuscule, magisterial witness to the wonder-book of yawping cosmological eye. (Science fiction pocket-book covers had forever seared the memory of a boy called Marcus Weiner, but the cryptonesic Will’m knew not whence the images came.) The pounding of surf stupefied him with reverence—any damn fool knew there had to be life elsewhere. Soon starships would hover like floating Escherian cities, ivied and fountain-filled, populated by toga’d handmaidens.

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