Cage's Bend Page 5

  “I promise, Mama,” Cage said.

  “Cage, that was very serious, you running off,” she said.

  Cage didn’t say anything, suddenly uneasy.

  “We’re going to have to punish you.” His mother shook her head sadly. “You know you’re not allowed to run off by yourself. You can’t run off every time that you have to take a bath.”

  Cage looked at his father.

  “I’m sorry, little man, but you broke the rules, rules for your own good,” he said.

  “I told the truth,” Cage said. “Like George Washington.”

  “That’s good, son. You must always tell the truth.” His father’s voice was soft and slow. “But you still broke the rules.”

  Cage saw Nick peeking from behind a door down the hallway.

  “Not fair.” Cage pulled away from his mother.

  “It is fair, son. You have to follow the rules.” Frank sat down in a chair and held out his arms. “Come here, son.”

  Slowly Cage walked over and bent over his father’s thigh so that he was looking directly at Nick, who saw their father smile slightly when their mother said, “Looks like he’s laying his head down on a guillotine.”

  Cage pressed his lips together, tensing his body as his father whacked him hard three times on the bottom, and he did not scream or cry despite the stinging that surged through him, despite all the fury. He pushed himself up without saying a word and ran down the hall, past Nick, who was wearing a one-piece pajama suit with footies. From behind, their father called, “Nick, back in bed. Cage, get ready for your bath.”

  “We’ll read Jeremy Fisher,” their mother nearly sang. “I promise.”

  Harper

  On the TV behind the bar, thousands of kids my age fill Tiananmen Square in China. I wonder if they have any chance of bringing down the government. They look much poorer and much braver than the students drinking and shouting around me, oblivious to the demonstration.

  “Something the matter with the beer?” Alice asks from behind the bar. She’s a kindly local in her thirties. I usually flirt with her after a few drinks, which she tolerates with good humor.

  “Nah, I just don’t feel like drinking,” I sigh.

  “Bad day?”

  “Waited three hours for my brother to show up for dinner, then hitched out here and now I don’t feel like drinking.”

  “You just missed him. Billy had to throw him out. Cage kept jumping up on the bar with his guitar. Left with that Sylvia girl.”

  “God, I’m sorry, Alice.”

  “I like Cage. He’s welcome back. But he’s out of control these days. Needs to lay off the jack.”

  “Yeah, I don’t understand what’s happened to him.” I put some cash on the bar. “Night, Alice.”

  I walk about a mile in pitch-dark before some girls pick me up and drop me off at my place. Bone-tired from six ten-hour days, I read a few pages of Siddhartha and fall asleep around midnight, planning on crashing until noon. When I wake up, Cage is staring at me at the end of the bed, strumming his guitar. Freshly shaved, his hair swept back with gel, he’s wearing a blue blazer and white pants. His eyes are electric. “Harpo, listen to this song I just wrote.”

  Nick and Cage are Irish twins

  Born in sixties in the very same year,

  The sons of a preacher and a Tennessee belle

  who met on a Carolina pier.

  Nick likes to spend time alone,

  an introvert who’s kind of shy.

  Cage likes to run with the pack,

  ’Cause he’s another breed of guy.

  Behind him Sylvia, who would be quite pretty if she wasn’t so anorexic, sits in a cloud of ganja smoke, nodding in time. She’s wearing a dress and a cashmere coat. Her eyes are just as wild. The wind-up clock on the dresser shows nine-thirty.

  Nick’s studying to save the world,

  Always knew what he wanted to be,

  While Cage was a man cast adrift who

  Found himself on cold northern sea.

  So let them be the kind of men they are,

  Let ’em alone and they will both go far,

  Let ’em do whatever they each choose

  ’Cause they’re wearing different-size shoes.

  “What do you think?” He sets the guitar on the floor.

  “It’s great.” I yawn. “But Nick’s dead.”

  “No, he’s living the greater life, that’s what Dad would say. You know what today is?”

  “Yeah, I haven’t forgotten.” I rub my eyes.

  “Right. We’re all going to church.”

  “I’m a humanist. I don’t go to church. Are y’all tripping?”

  “We’re coming down,” Sylvia says.

  Sylvia parks her new Saab a block from a little stone Episcopal church. Climbing out, we hear hymns coming through the open front doors.

  “Hurry up, sports fans, we’re late.” Cage pulls his guitar from the open window and starts across the street.

  “I’m not going in if you take the guitar.” I sit down on the hood.

  “It’s a legitimate way to worship.”

  “Not in there it’s not.” I start to pull my tie loose.

  “Leave it,” Sylvia tells him. “Harpo’s right.”

  I follow them into the nave, where shafts of light slant through the stained glass, making bright circles on the wine-colored carpet. The church is fairly full. About a hundred people are standing, reading a psalm in unison: “Wash me through and through from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin.”

  “Cage, this way,” I whisper, nodding toward an empty pew to the side in the transept.

  Cage shakes his head. “The front row’s always empty.” He starts up the center aisle, reciting along with the congregation from memory: “For behold, you look for truth deep within me and will make me understand wisdom secretly.”

  The congregation sits down before we reach the empty pew. I feel their eyes on us. Cage smiles like a movie star, guiding Sylvia up the aisle with his hand on her elbow. A teenage girl with long blonde hair smiles back at him. From a high lectern a woman begins to read the lesson. Sylvia sits down, Cage kneels beside her. I sit down just as the congregation rises to sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Nick sings louder than anyone and he sings well. After the hymn everyone remains standing while an old bald priest with a hearing aid comes down the center aisle where an acolyte holds a big Bible open to the Gospels. I’m trying to follow the reading from Luke when Cage whispers, “Didn’t you used to hate it every Sunday when the ushers passed the plate and everyone tossed in dollar bills? Like Pop’s salary was coming out of the plate, like we were a family of beggars, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I whisper back. “It made me feel like Dad was inferior, like he became a priest because he couldn’t make it in the marketplace.”

  “Think of what a good speaker he is. He could have been a great politician. And he was a good role model.” Cage smiles. “Did you ever want to be a preacher?”

  I laugh through my nose.

  “The Holy Ghost never summoned you to the pulpit?”

  “No.”

  “I feel the Holy Ghost creeping up on me now,” Cage says a little too loud as everyone in the congregation sits down except for him.

  A woman across the aisle glances at us.

  “The Holy Ghost is calling me to be its instrument,” Cage says a little louder.

  “Sit down, Cage,” Sylvia whispers.

  “Let me by,” he says softly, smiling.

  “No,” I say. “Sit down now.”

  Placing one hand on the railing, he vaults over the pew front and dashes forward in time to cut off the old priest, the only other person in the church standing, at the steps that lead up to the pulpit.

  A few feet away the rector is seated in a tall ornate chair in front of the empty choir stall. A heavy man with a black beard and warm eyes, he looks puzzled. When he rises to his feet, his face grows stern and he says in a salty voice, “Cage Rutl
edge, what on earth—”

  “I beg your pardon, Father Farlow, but the Holy Ghost has summoned me to preach this beautiful summer morning in your stead,” Cage says loud enough for all the congregation to hear. Father Farlow must see the light in his eyes, for he suddenly looks cautious and says nothing. Cage bows to him and then to the old priest, who, with a confused expression, is adjusting his hearing aid.

  Cage brushes past him and mounts the lectern. He projects his voice the way he did when I saw him at the Vanderbilt theater in Fool for Love two years ago: “Good morning, brethren.”

  I realize my mouth is hanging open. I shut it as my mind goes into a mode akin to once when I was driving Cage’s car near Sewanee, spinning out of control on ice, and time seemed to slow down, and I calmly recovered from a couple of 360-degree turns while absorbing every detail. I turn around to gauge the response of the congregants, who appear to have woken up from a daydream. A couple of young married men are grinning while their wives look concerned and a number of elderly folks can’t make out who is in the pulpit. The mother of the girl who smiled when we walked in now looks suspiciously at me.

  “I won’t keep you long,” Cage says in a deep, confident voice. From a distance he appears to be a specimen of perfect health, tan and handsome in his blue blazer as if he had just stepped off a yacht.

  Two ushers, who look like they’d played football twenty years before, have come to the far end of the aisle behind the rear pews and stand waiting for a signal from the rector, who looks at Cage with a sympathetic expression. One of the ushers suddenly turns and hurries down a staircase at the back of the nave into the undercroft. Across the aisle, one row back, a woman and her three children are craning their necks and looking at me as if I’m about to leap up myself. I shrug and raise my palms. The family all avert their eyes simultaneously.

  “How many of you have read Moby-Dick? Surely all of you know that Captain Ahab set sail from the harbor down the street in pursuit of the white whale. I’ve been rereading Melville’s masterpiece recently.” Cage is using his southern senator’s voice. “Many of the chapters are themselves sermons of a sort. But there is an actual sermon in the book preached by the ancient black cook to sharks that are in a feeding frenzy on the carcass of a whale lashed to the side of their vessel.” He suddenly switches into a black dialect: “Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.”

  A handful of people laugh.

  “Now, look here, bred’ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out your neighbor’s mout, I say.”

  There’s more laughter, even from Father Farlow. Sylvia is laughing hard, clutching her arms around her concave belly.

  Cage switches back to the orator’s voice: “Now, if you take the whale to be the world and the blubber wealth, Melville seems to be saying that we should not be so grasping in our pursuit of wealth. Now, most of the people I know, most of the lawyers and bankers and builders I’ve met on the island, and most of the professionals who visit from New York or Boston don’t go to church. Many of their children have no idea what goes on in church. They have only a vague notion of God.” Cage points his finger at me and holds it in the air. “My own brother calls himself a humanist. I had to drag him in here with me today. Bet he wishes he hadn’t come, huh, Harper? My own brother, the son of a . . . bishop. But I digress. The point is that here, in the last days of the twentieth century, the blubber itself—wealth—has become the religion. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out your neighbor’s mout, I say!”

  The congregation erupts as loud as the laugh track on a sitcom. Sylvia’s laughter turns into coughing.

  “Now, I know that I am preaching to the converted, though no doubt even some of us believers are suffering from a powerful attraction to the blubber, and you blubbermongers should look deep in your hearts, but what concerns me is how we can make our neighbors outside the church aware of the dangers of blubber. In anthropological terms man is no longer a Homo habilis, handyman, the Toolmaker. Homo sapiens has become the Toy Buyer. For men pursue blubber in order to buy toys, more toys, and more toys.” Cage pauses and looks at the back of the church where the usher who disappeared is starting up the aisle with a policeman. “Fellow-critters, dere is a shark swimmin’ tow’d me as I speak. I hab yet to conclude da homilie this morning but it high time to heave off.” He leaps down from the pulpit, dodges past Father Farlow, and dashes toward the side of the church.

  I don’t know what to do. I don’t take to the idea of tackling him in church. I just sort of freeze. Cage reaches a stained-glass window, which is round like a portal and open, swung on hinges in the middle so the glass is parallel to the ground, with a breeze passing above and below it. Cage springs up and pulls his head and shoulders through the space at the bottom of the window.

  A hundred hushed voices are murmuring behind me.

  Sylvia clutches my arm.

  Father Farlow is saying something from the pulpit.

  Watching Cage wiggle his butt through the hole, I think of Nick telling me the story of when Papa taught them the word buttocks. Cage and Nick were about four or five and getting into one of the big Ford LTD station wagons. Papa had said, Sit still and don’t let your buttocks leave the seat, and the little boys fell to the ground, rolling with laughter. In the car Cage kept repeating, Buttocks, and Nick kept howling with laughter.

  “Sir?”

  I turn and the policeman is leaning over the armrest of the pew.

  “Yes.” I should stand up but I’m still stunned.

  “I’d like a word with you two,” the usher says over the cop’s shoulder.

  “Sure.” We get up. Father Farlow smiles kindly from the pulpit. I wave and smile weakly and follow the usher toward the back of the church, everyone staring at us from both sides, the policeman walking behind me as if I might make a run for it.

  The usher leads us down to the undercroft, a basement with a linoleum floor and a table set with a big coffee brewer and plates of cookies. Sylvia pulls a cigarette out of a small purse. “You can’t smoke here,” the usher says.

  Sylvia sticks the unlit cigarette between her lips.

  “That cowboy who was hijacking the pulpit is your brother?” The cop takes out a little notepad. His name tag says Officer Henderson. He writes down my name, phone number, and address. Upstairs the congregation is singing.

  “Where does your brother live?”

  “Right now he’s house-sitting out in Cisco. I can’t remember the name of the street.”

  “You can do better than that,” the cop says. “If you want us to be nice, you should cooperate.”

  “There’s a bunch of boats in the front yard. But I’m not sure where he’ll be next week.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Is he drunk or high on something?” Henderson watches me with eyes that show no sympathy.

  “Cage hasn’t been the same since our brother died.” My voice is thick. “Um, in a car accident two years ago today.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Go easy, Ed,” the usher says.

  “Well.” I glance at Sylvia, who gives me a look like I’ve already ratted them out.

  She takes the cigarette from her mouth, then puts it back.

  “He’s been hitting the bottle pretty hard.”

  “If you’re any kind of brother, you’ll bring him in to the station before we find him. He’ll probably get off with a warning.” Henderson points his pen at me. “If we have to go looking for him, it won’t be no Sunday school.”

  Cage

  It’s night. Only a faint glow of moonlight through the windows. Is it closer to dusk or dawn? I hear her breathing beside me in bed. She is here but I
feel no connection to her, as if she doesn’t know me, that we are two apes who happen to be lying beside each other by arbitrary selection. I can’t remember getting in bed. I stare up at the ceiling, try to reach back a few hours, but there is only darkness and the sound of a car on the road. Darkness in the room. Darkness in my head. Why do I get these gaps? Drugs? asked that little, frightened woman at the Nantucket health service when I told her I had racing thoughts and couldn’t sleep and I thought that people looked at me as if I didn’t belong on the island. No, I hadn’t been doing any drugs. She looked more confused than I was and scared of me. I think it was my leather jacket and my earring and long hair. I hadn’t done any drugs for months until I walked out of her office.

  The psychologists I’ve met are clueless anyway. I was so depressed at Vanderbilt that I started sleeping all day. I couldn’t face the classrooms filled by fumes from the erasable markers they used to cover the walls with graphs. Remembering the fumes gives me a headache. Mankind was born in the forests of Africa and not meant to dwell in concrete and cardboard towers with a random selection of humanity breathing chemical fumes. There I was, burning up my parents’ money, going in debt to be a cog in a machine, preparing for a life in an office, my head cracking every time I smelled the fumes. The Vanderbilt counselors were buffoons. They thought I should ride it out. I should never have been there. My grades steadily declined, then fell off a cliff. Toward the end I was unraveling. Stayed in my apartment for two weeks and made soup for myself and read an Elvis biography and thought I was watching the hair fall out of my head every time I looked in the mirror and no one at school even asked where I was. For an international marketing class we had to get a partner or a group of people to do a presentation. I got together with another misfit, a guy from China, and we did this thing on selling crematoriums because they had so many people over there who were dying. Macabre. He used to sell them. I got up in front of the class and couldn’t remember what I was saying. We were supposed to be addressing the class as if we were addressing the board of directors of a company to ask for money to do marketing R&D. I had all these prepared notes in front of me and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I couldn’t organize my thoughts. I finally just put my notes down and said, Look, all I really want is forty dollars from the board so I can buy this directory of international business. The class started howling and the professor reached in his pocket and pulled out two twenties. In front of this whole big group of people. Everybody was laughing at me.