Onion Songs Read online

  “Read me the message.” Morgan’s voice was firm.

  “But, sir...”

  “Read me the entire message. You have a job to do.”

  The Western Union man read rapidly. “The bodies were burned almost beyond recognition. Their faces were fixed in expressions of... agony. Your little girl still clutched the charred remains of her doll.” He looked up. “I’m so sorry.”

  Morgan sighed and looked past the messenger at the endless row of streetlights leading down into the city. “Oh... oh, I appreciate your going to this trouble for me, delivering such a personal message and all.” He stared at the messenger’s sweaty face. “You’re really too kind.”

  At four in the morning the messenger had returned. He was pale, his eyes bright red from lack of sleep. “Oh... ohhhh. I’m so sorry. You see, they keep calling me, telling me to come down here. With these horrible messages. I don’t understand it.”

  “And who, exactly, are they?”

  The Western Union man just stood there, watching him.

  “Who?”

  “I... I don’t know.”

  Morgan looked down at the messenger’s hands. “You’re holding the message in your hands.” He smiled at the little man. “I’d suggest you read it.”

  “I haven’t slept for days,” the man whispered, shaking his head.

  “You’re a very dedicated man. Won’t you come in?”

  The messenger appeared suddenly frightened. “No... oh, no. I’ll just deliver the message and be off. I don’t... don’t want to bother you longer than necessary.”

  “And the message?”

  The messenger read slowly. “Your parents have murdered each other. They... they were found with their fingers wrapped around each other’s throats. You’re all alone now.” He opened his mouth, gulping for air. “It says here... the message is dated fifteen years ago!”

  “You do well at your assigned task. Your employers must be quite pleased with you.”

  The Western Union man shuffled his feet, staring at the welcome mat beneath them. “I suppose I should be leaving you... to your grief.”

  At six in the morning the messenger returned. He was agitated, running his thin hands up and down the front of his uniform blazer. He squinted as if he could barely see.

  “Why?” The messenger gazed at him helplessly. “Why does this continue to happen? I haven’t slept. I don’t even remember how I received these messages. I lie down to sleep and the next thing I know I’m ringing your doorbell, and you’re answering the door.”

  Morgan looked at him impatiently. “You have your task to perform.”

  The messenger clutched at Morgan’s sleeve. “Please. Please, this has to stop.”

  “You have your sacred task. Read me the message.”

  “I really need this job, you know? I have an old mother to support. And the prices these days, you know what I mean? It takes money.”

  “Just read me the message. I don’t need to know all that; I don’t want to know all that. It’s not your job to relay your life history to your customers.”

  “There’s so little caring in the world. We’re strangers to other people.”

  “That’s simply human nature, my man. Just read me the message.”

  The messenger moaned and stared at the paper. After a few seconds Morgan reached over and pulled the paper out of his hands, almost tearing it, the messenger’s grip was so tight.

  Morgan began to read. “You will commit murder.”

  The Western Union man whimpered. Morgan put his hand on the little man’s shoulder. “You’re a fine messenger, a credit to the company.”

  “I’m really tired. This must stop.”

  “Get some rest. Drink some coffee. Soon you must make your rounds again.”

  Morgan closed the door on the slumped figure of the messenger and walked back into his study.

  He sat at his desk. He gazed up into the memorial alcove he had prepared above the desk, at the black-framed pictures of his parents, his dead wife and children. “You do a good job, little man.”

  He ran his narrow fingers over the top message scribbled hastily on his message pad. Morgan read the message silently to himself.

  You will be cruel. You will have no compassion. The world has treated you badly.

  At seven the doorbell rang once again. He was chuckling as he walked down the hallway from his office. By the time he reached the door there were tears in his eyes from the paroxysms of laughter wracking his body. He was barely able to nudge open the door, so great was his hilarity.

  The Western Union man was down on his knees in front of the door, one hand out beseechingly, his eyes white coins, speechless. The little man was weeping.

  Morgan howled with a raw laughter as he removed the gun from his coat, aimed, and pulled the trigger.

  THE HIJACKER

  He thinks that the stewardess is pretty enough to be a high-fashion model. “You’re pretty enough to be a high-fashion model,” he tells her in a cheery voice. She smiles at him, although he knows she must think him a pathetic youth with his greasy hair and vaguely foreign accent—obviously she has heard this many times before—and her expression tells him everything. She’s incapable of secrecy. He almost asks her to go out with him after they land—a fleeting insanity—he has never, ever, asked a woman for a date before, though he is almost thirty, and this would not be the time to begin.

  He spreads his overcoat wide to show her the twenty sticks of dynamite, the coiled wire, and timer strapped to his flat, Italian belly. She falls to her knees in submission and once again he tells her she might be a model, she needn’t be here at all—in the clutches of this mad man, this human bomb—she could be modeling expensive gowns at fifty dollars per hour, courted by actors, recognized by the most casual passer-by as a real live “cover girl.” She takes this proposition more seriously now, nodding her head stonily as he dances up and down the aisles of the plane, his dynamite jiggling lewdly.

  He listens to the sound of his own voice. It always amazes him, so soft and gentle. Not the voice of one who might commit so desperate an act. But, he had failed his religion, he knew that. He hadn’t had it in him to become the priest. And perhaps his friends were right; perhaps he was homosexual? What would his mother think?

  His body feels very, very heavy.

  He had been followed—that much was obvious. Explosives had been wired to his automobile ignition, poison laced through his broccoli and mint tea. The saboteurs were men like his father, violent drinkers, hostile toward every good impulse in mankind. He sorely wished he could have made it to the priesthood.

  He thinks back to the night before. He couldn’t sleep. He knew something awful was about to happen.

  The captain begs and pleads with him, a nobody, the sickly Italian lad, although a son of hearty stock who might have become a prize fighter if this had only been the fifties, to sit down, let him turn the plane back before it’s too late. The young hijacker knows that the captain has been through many such hijackings, but now he is old, his hands shake, his wife has left him, or so the young hijacker imagines, his children hate him—in short, he has lost his nerve. The co-pilot, who despises this disgusting coward, surely must envy the Italian boy from the Bronx. He must realize that the hijacker now controls the entire plane; he controls the destinies of two hundred people. The handsome Italian boy smiles, and offers the co-pilot the position of Air Force general when they land.

  He leans against an empty seat, closing his eyes and reliving momentarily the great exhilaration he felt upon breaking free of the ground, like an enormous balloon popping, as he escaped into thin air.

  Perhaps he would land in Cuba. Perhaps the godless Communists would put him to death. They would bear down on him with tanks and flamethrowers, and he would be unable to move. His feet would be glued to the spot. He would weigh ten tons.

  He had been a good boy. He didn’t use bad words and he didn’t laugh at dirty jokes. His only vice was sleepwalking.
r />   He suddenly wonders why he didn’t bring his father’s old Luger pistol along with him. He could have used it on the hijacking; surely it was around the old home place somewhere?

  He wouldn’t have been doing such an awful thing if he had become a priest. His mother would have been pleased; she believed in the Church. His little sisters and older brother would have been proud. Perhaps he wouldn’t have felt the need to drink so much.

  The sweet, young Italian boy props his feet up in the cockpit. He’s sure the aged navigator is smiling at him, surely thinking the would-be priest might have been his own son. The captain is crying hysterically in the corner. The stewardess looks grim, but is stroking the Italian boy’s forehead, surely finding him enormously attractive. The co-pilot flies the plane, making exaggerated winks at the Italian hero. A better life awaits in Italy, the mother country, when they arrive. Money, fame, political power for the handsome Italian youth. Modeling jobs for the stewardess. It was so easy, the Italian boy thinks, and if they had refused to give up their silly airplane—silly to think of it now—he was going to commit suicide. The stewardess smiles as if she is reading his thoughts.

  He had been a mouse while his father was alive; he had been worthless. But then his father died, and in this act of hijacking, this focusing of all his latent powers, he had taken charge of his life in the way that had been his father’s only virtue.

  He had had difficulty walking; now he had regained his equilibrium.

  His had been a futile rage; now it was released. He had become omnipotent, rising above all restrictions.

  He had gambled with fate and won.

  The handsome Italian boy from the Bronx gazes out of the window, down through the clouds, to his father stretched out naked and obese below. The old man groans and sputters in his sleep, and his useless sex organ seems to become increasingly wrinkled with each of his hesitant breaths. The Italian boy notices mountain lodges and recreation centers sprouting between the tough ridges of abdominal skin. He orders the plane’s baggage be dumped on the recumbent form, hoping to rattle the old man’s nerves.

  The stewardess brings another tray of drinks as ordered. He downs them hastily.

  The plane rips into the upper reaches of air, the Italian boy thinking how there is no turning back, ousted for good, the whole world down there, his father groaning beneath the weight of excreted baggage, and he, just a handsome Italian boy from the Bronx, free, free and on his way to Mother Italy.

  But then he snaps out of his reverie, sure he will be caught. Some brave member of the crew, perhaps even the co-pilot, will daringly grab his wrists, forcing him to the ground, while the cunning stewardess disarms his vest of dynamite. Or perhaps he’ll land in Italy, only to be greeted by several divisions of the Italian army, their massive guns trained on him. In any case, it would be one more failure added to the many failures of his life. He would be transferred to a stateside hospital, put into a psychiatric unit, and when he got out he would have to try all over again.

  He is amazed by the grayness of the plane’s inner walls. He runs from the cockpit and dashes back through the plane’s fuselage, but he finds no crew, no passengers, not even the cunning but beautiful stewardess. The odor of rotting flesh gags him. He looks out a window and sees the pale gray, outstretched arm of his father, simulating a wing. He can hear his father’s heartbeat, thundering behind fleshy walls where the plane engine should be.

  Again he wakes from his sleepwalking, now realizing that his bomb has gone off while he dozed. Dark corpses sit rigidly in their seats. He recognizes a cluster of burnt forms as the captain and crew, another as a family grouping complete with two toddlers. He recognizes the dark form of the stewardess from her smile. Roughly three-fourths of the plane has been blown away. But still, he thinks, still he has succeeded. He holds out his transparent gray arms at shoulder height. He makes droning noises in his throat, staring forward, guiding his passengers into the new freedom of the deep blue skies.

  OUT LATE IN THE PARK

  Once again, Clarence Senior has let the ball get away from him. The other men gasp when it rolls out of the shadowed circle formed by our beloved trees and into the brilliant sunlight baking the sand paths where the beautiful young people stroll. Jacob, one of our oldest, scowls bitterly. I raise an eyebrow in warning—or I believe I do. Facial control has been more difficult these past few months. Often I’m not sure whether my thin line of mouth is smiling or twisted into some shape less agreeable.

  As has been typical for him, Jacob ignores me. “He’ll spoil it!” he growls through a swallow of phlegm. “He’ll spoil it for all of us!”

  I raise my hand to stop him, but too late because I can feel the stirrings of the angled things that dwell at the edges of the sun-lit path. It’s terrible, worrying that every spat of anger might cause your heart to seize, and then the whole of your body comes tumbling down and there’s no more light in you than a dark stone at the bottom of a pond. Finally Jacob recognizes my warning and stops, takes a deep, savored breath as if it’s to be his last one. Which it might be, of course. In this park of the world, suddenness is the business of the day.

  Clarence Senior, as usual, appears to be somewhat lacking in orientation. He trots playfully after the volleyball. I envy the looseness of his stride, something my own arthritis denies me. But I am pleased that one of our own can still play with such reckless abandon.

  “He’ll get hit by a car!” George cries nonsensically. “We’ll all get hit by cars!” This has been George’s signature warning since he first started coming to the park. I assume his family has some tragic history related to the automobile, but of course I do not inquire. Men of our age trust each other well enough not to ask. We all assume tragedy and imagine disaster. Perhaps this makes us less sympathetic—certainly it makes us impatient. And burying the curiosity of our youth has become a measure of the respect we have for one another.

  Although, if truth be told, I would say we respect nothing more than the dark, and the half-remembered things that move there.

  Now the others are yelling. Of course I have seen this phenomenon before—all of us are quick to panic. It is something that happens to the nerves, I suppose, as the nervous system constantly monitors to determine if the flesh is still alive. Men my age understand the process. There is nothing worse than waking up in the middle of the night to discover that a favorite extremity has died.

  “Get him back!” Joseph sobs. He is a weepy thing, old Joseph, more so than the rest of us, even though as a group we are a weepy bunch indeed. “Get him back!” Again, with that disturbing flail of movement-limited arms. Some sort of stroke, I believe. Strokes are as common among our kind as flies on newly harvested meat.

  “Just stop it! Stop it!” I complain, unable to bear their old guy whining a second longer. “Can’t you just let him play? We have plenty of extra balls—grab a couple and toss them around! Nothing’s going to happen to him, or any one of us because of him!”

  I do not believe any of this, of course, but it gets their minds off Clarence. He retrieves the ball from a beautiful young woman who has been watching us from the edge of one of those sunny paths. I stare at her for some time, even after Clarence Senior has jogged happily back into our little circle. The other men quickly close around him in case he’s been followed.

  The young woman is unusual in that she has noticed us. We are not used to being noticed at all, especially by beautiful young women. I wonder if those of us with daughters—Jacob, Samuel, perhaps one or two others—feel the same confused anticipation when a young woman looks at them. I wonder if they suffer from the same temporal dislocation of desire the rest of us experience.

  She looks quite familiar. But then all the young women look familiar to me. By the time a man reaches my age he has stockpiled the blueprints of a thousand young women in the caves of his memory, ready for somber perusal during the long, lonely hours before dawn.

  The young woman’s eyes lock with mine and she slips in a quick
smile. My heart speeds as a long stem of black insect leg darts from one corner of her mouth and scratches futilely at her chin before her dark red tongue can usher the leg back inside her mouth.

  I look away as if with mere embarrassment, as if some part of her garment had slipped away and revealed more than might be decent. When I look back she is gone, but the ground where she stood appears blackened and torn.

  *

  Joseph injures himself again. His eyes are always filling with tears and then he can’t see more than a few inches in front of him. He runs into things and then he falls down hard. Clarence Senior is always trying to help by convincing him that he isn’t really hurt. “See, no blood!” Clarence Senior shouts with no small measure of delirium. He says this every time, even when there’s blood gushing from the wound. Everything is A-OK in Clarence Senior’s world, even though Clarence Junior hates him, even though he has the worst nightmares of us all.

  “Throw me the ball! Me me me!” George cries, his belly moving independently of his leap. Benjamin, the retired carpenter—perhaps the best coordinated of us all—throws the ball and George drops it. No one laughs or complains—it has always been George’s job to drop the ball. He staggers back and forth as he attempts to pick it up, frustrated to tears because his knees will not bend properly. If someday he were to magically acquire competence there would be considerable tension generated in the group, for only by comparison do the rest of us remain competent.

  Benjamin shuffles after the ball like some huge, shaggy toy run by remote control. No one knows very much about Benjamin—he started playing with us one day as if he’d always been here. He has never spoken. I get the impression that he simply has nothing to say and will not pretend. A far better way of being in the world, I think. The rest of us speak constantly, fueled more by anxiety than idea.

  We toss the ball and drop the ball, we run around things called bases, worshipping at each one briefly before being urged on by the impatient cries of our companions. The bases are old schoolbooks, interestingly shaped stones, and stakes ripped from the hard hearts of trees and driven almost flush into the ground. Who among us would have the power to execute such a pounding? It has always been here, driven ages ago by some comic book hero or other. It would be nice to linger, but our fear is that to stop even briefly, to stop at all, would be to invite the fragments of black into our mouths, into our ears and eyes and anuses, until all motion is stopped forever.