Home Game by Paul Quarrington

Author:Paul Quarrington [Quarrington, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36407-4
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 1996-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

You have probably heard the voice of Nathanael Crybaby Isbister. A recording of his coverage of the Hindenburg landing still exists and is played frequently. It is a frightening thing to listen to. It is the voice of a man who has no control over the hell that is pouring out of him, no control over the absolute terror that has engulfed him. At the end of the recording he announces, from the bottom of his raw, naked, and very human soul, that he cannot continue.

Many of you might be wondering how this last section found its way into the book, being as my grandfather has been, up to now, adamant about keeping Isbister’s past shrouded in mystery. I myself was shocked, but did not question it. My grandfather, however, gives me an unbidden explanation.

“I got to thinking,” he says, “about what it was like back then. A lot of fellas were on the bum just like Nate—but they were different. They were on the bum mostly because they hated other people. They figured they’d been stepped on, trampled, and drug through manure all their lives, so they finally just said, ‘Fuck you guys, I ain’t having nothing more to do with you!’ But Isbister, he didn’t hate other people at all. Farthest thing from it. But I guess sometimes he was … angry with us.”

“Angry with us?” I ask, half listening, half typing out Nathanael’s conversation with Stella.

“Yeah … ’cause sometimes we do such … stupid things.”

The next words I hear from my grandfather have a strange sound to them—somewhere within lies a moan. He says, “Look at your hands.”

I do look at my hands, resting on the typewriter’s keys. Where they are not bandaged the skin is beginning to shine a brilliant purple; many of the joints have swollen to twice their normal size. I turn to my grandfather—he sombrely lifts his gaze from my hands to my eyes. I see how old he is, my grandfather, how many wrinkles line his face. “They’ll heal,” I tell him, and get back to my typing. He says nothing and is motionless. “Remember,” I ask him, “how Major Mite used to get into McCallister’s trousers and then they’d go to a whorehouse?” I wait for the laugh. It starts off slowly, a couple of silent chuckles, but soon my grandfather is wheezing and coughing and rolling about on the ground. When he is through laughing, my grandfather starts in again with animated conversation about Isbister. “Yeah, he didn’t hate us at all,” he states.

I suggest, “Maybe there wasn’t an ounce of hate in the man.”

“Don’t be stupid, boy!” he says, and bats me on the head. (It does not hurt.) “That man had more hate than anyone I ever met!”

“But you just said—”

“For himself, boy. He hated himself.”

It hadn’t occurred to me, stated as simply as that, but I begin to dwell on it. “I wonder why?”

“Lots of reasons, I suppose. But probably the main thing is that he couldn’t really hate anybody or anything else.

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