William Trowbridge

The Canasta Players: Seven at Autumn's Gold We real old. We bell-tolled. We dilate. We stagflate. We sing thin. We shake Schwinn. We shit-doled. You stuff gold.

The squirrels are spreading the rumor: no more monkey business. The Dow Jones hops up, then down, then back up, trying for attention, up against dog days. The Capitol dome rattles like a witch doctor's gourd. “More Republicans,” warn the talking drums. The networks labor underground to stockpile T, A, and blood capsules for Sweeps Week, when all hell won’t be enough to save some. Pedestrians slip into light coats of pollen and mold spores. The Enquirer reports the sighting of Satan's image over Chicago during the heat emergency. His words were, “For the hottest deals in town, see Sal at Mutto's Chevrolet on East Wacker.” The old elms shrug: “You think this is hot: we could tell you about hot.” Walmart and Kmart burgeon into crooked towers of back-to-school candy. They're heaven-bound, via the moon. Greeters offer themselves to the lowest common denominator. There's a Blue- Light on moon caps. Representatives from Tire City have announced they intend a hostile takeover and cleansing of their former territory, now known as Carpet City. Furniture City will not intervene. The NFL’s negotiating for rights to the Baptist Church. The carnies have packed up the Tilt-A-Whirl and Ferris wheel, leaving us up to our ass in free parking. Everyone under 30 dreams of shoplifting some Air Jordans for school. Everyone over 30 dreams of going to prison for shoplifting. The hypochondriacs wake up noticing little dark spots in front of their eyes, think they could be in the middle of something serious. “Winterize now,” say the prime-time commercials. “Spend, spend, spend!” cry the cicadas and katydids over the scorched, moonlit lawns.

. . . and it seem as though I could see my heart before my eyes, turning dark black with hate of rages, or harhequinade, stripped from that munner life leaving only naked being-hate. —Charles Starkweather On the Great Plains in March, the wind blows for days. Gutter pipes vibrate, shingles flap; things begin to come loose. Once they found old Miss Purdy wandering at midnight on U.S. 40, her dainty-laced nightgown billowing over her spindly, blue-gray thighs. It took three deputies to hold her down till the doctor arrived. On the Great Plains in March the dry elm scrapes at an upstairs window, dust devils swirl and disperse across the wide, empty fields, and a pistol shot sounds no louder than a screen door slapping on a porch.

It chafed like some new skin we’d grown, or feathers, the cummerbund and starched collar pinching us to show how real this transformation into princes was, how powerful we’d grown by getting drivers’ licenses, how tall and total our new perspective, above that rusty keyhole parents squinted through. We’d found the key: that nothing really counts except a romance bright as Technicolor, wide as Cinerama, and this could be the night. No lie.

How burdensome they seemed, wartime oldies that could drive our parents teary: “I’ll Be Seeing You,” with its hint of being swept off in a global riptide; or the shaky follow-up of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” followed by a shakier “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else But Me),” “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer,” or “Ac- Cent-Tchu-Are the Positive.” We suffered them on the old cathedral radio, crooned by Crosby and Sinatra, had to watch them strangled on The Lawrence Welk Show or laced with Como’s heavy dose of sedative. Dad told us, “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” Mom hummed, “Keep the Home Fires Burning”—till our music cut the cord. Brash and free of corn, it hailed rock ‘n’ roll, caught Maybellene at the top of the hill, moaned “m’ baby-doll, m’ baby-doll, m’ baby-doll.” We played it loud and often, but they never understood.

The reception's not bad, across 50 years, though his voice has lost its boot-camp timbre. He's in his 80's now and, in a recent photo, looks it, so bald and pale and hard to see behind the tallowing of flesh. Posing with friends, he's the only one who has to sit—the man three of us couldn't pin. "The Hugger," they christened him before my class arrived— for his bearlike shape and his first name, Hugh. He fostered even us, the lowly track squad. "Mr. Morrison," I still call him. "You were the speedster on the team, a flash," he recalls with a chuckle. That's where his memory of me fades. And what have I retained of him beyond the nickname, voice, and burly shape? The rest could be invention: memory and desire's sleight-of-hand as we call up those we think we've known, to chat about the old days and the weather, bum hips and cholesterol, our small talk numbing as a dial tone, serious as prayer.

If it had worked out, I'd be on a train to Green Bay, not crawling up this building with the Air Corps on my ass. And if it weren't for love, I'd drop this shrieking little bimbo sixty stories and let them take me back to the exhibit, let them teach me to mambo and do imitations. They tried me on the offensive line, told me to take out the right cornerback for Nagurski. Eager to please, I wadded up the whole secondary, then stomped the line, then the bench and locker room, then the east end of town, to the river. But they were not pleased: they said I had to learn my position, become a team player. The great father Bear himself said that, so I tried hard to know the right numbers and how the arrows slanted toward the little o's. But the o's and the wet grass and the grunts drowned out the count, and the tight little cheers drew my arrow straight into the stands, and the wives tasted like flowers and raw fish. So I was put on waivers right after camp, and here I am, panty-sniffer, about to die a clown, who once opened a hole you could drive Nebraska through.

It showed the War was as my father said: boredom flanked by terror, a matter of keeping low and not freezing. “You wore your helmet square,” he said, not “at some stupid angle, like that draft-dodger Wayne,” who died so photogenically in The Sands of Iwa Jima. Those nights I heard shouts from the dark of my parents’ room, he was back down in his foxhole, barking orders, taking fire that followed him from France and Germany, then slipped into the house, where it hunkered in the rafters and thrived on ambush. We kept our helmets on, my mother and I, but there was no cover, and our helmets always tilted. He’d lump us with the ones he called “JohnDoes,” lazy, stupid, useless. We needed to straighten up and fly right, pick it up, chop chop, not get “nervous in the service.” We’d duck down like GIs where German snipers might be crouched in haylofts, their breaths held for the clean shot. “Bang,” my father said, “the dead went down, some like dying swans, some like puppets with their strings cut.” I wanted to hear more, but he’d change the subject, talk about the pennant, the Cards’ shaky odds, how Musial was worth the whole JohnDoe lot of them.

To Have and Have Not, 1944 Betty Joan Perske, age nineteen, gives that look, the one that shifts tectonic plates, to Bogie, and that’s it: Germany surrenders, Japan bows its apologies, and that sailor smooches the nurse in Times Square. The world, no longer black and white, makes love as D-Day shrinks to just a time for planting daffodils, and Hiroshima grows Toyotas. Harry T. has lunch with Stalin; General Patton takes up nursing Bonsai trees. “You know how to whistle, don’t you,” says Bacall, as the moon sighs and the Earth sighs back. “Just put your lips together and blow.”

How did we get here so suddenly, with our bags and baggage, looking the worse for wear, the ones misfortune hasn't wrung into anything-but-perfect strangers? Old buddies, old loves, old antagonists chat at the bar in the Hilton lobby; white-haired, no-haired dyed-haired, ringers for those oldsters so irrelevant to proms and cruising, to study halls and going steady—to life as we knew it. The smithereens of yesteryear, mostly orphans who’ve buried Mom and Dad, we’re holding out in a Guadalcanal of hazard and heart-soreness: edema, angina, sarcoma, thrombosis. Casualties mount, as do the MIAs. Why aren't we vexed? Why aren't we screaming? Never mind; we're here, upright, and don't have time to skip the niceties, which never seemed so nice, or to sweat the threats, as the dead, ever younger, smile toward the future from our senior yearbook. It's too late for a fallback plan. Tonight, we'll savor the motel cuisine, pass the Inglenook, and believe there's nothing opulent as this departure.