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Authors: Kevin P. Keating
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powerful essence, breathes its eerie energy, Coach Bernie Kaliher feels absolutely certain that his luck is about to change and breathes a long, heavy sigh of relief.
The Deer Park
I
An abrupt rush of cold air whistles through the front window of the cab, wrenching Edward de Vere from his gloomy ruminations. The driver, wreathed in silver smoke, clamps the smoldering butt of a cigarette between his tragic stumps of teeth and makes another small adjustment to the rearview mirror.
“You do not mind?”
De Vere shakes his head. No, the smoke doesn’t bother him, not terribly. After the violent confrontation that morning with his thieving son and the subsequent argument with his wife about the family’s financial troubles, de Vere discovers that he has become almost completely numb to pain, to pleasure, to the unvarying drone of his own thoughts.
From the pocket of his camelhair coat, he retrieves the flask inscribed with his initials (a gift from an utterly forgettable mistress), and with a wistful smile, takes a healthy swig of absinthe. De Vere has come to rely on the stuff. The effects are strictly spiritual of course, not particularly good for his ulcer or for his reasoning faculties, enemies of the mystical experience, but somehow it makes these evenings a little more interesting, less predictable. The liquor sears his esophagus, ignites the walls of his gut, spreads like a vast oil plume across the surface of his consciousness, illuminating the murkiest depths of his soul with tongues of Pentecostal fire. He relishes the sensation.
“Where are you going tonight, sir?” asks the driver.
“Oh, nowhere in particular.”
Because he doesn’t want to sound like just another slurring drunk in the back of a cab during the midnight hours, de Vere lifts his chin, purses his lips, and attempts to enunciate each syllable, each hard consonant, and nasally vowel, but he stumbles over that last word—
par-tic-u-lar
—and realizes, with some chagrin, that he can no longer disguise his old accent, can’t soften the working class cadences that for so many years marked him as a poseur. Lost is the patrician affectation he has fine-tuned since his days as a student at the Jesuit school. The ruse is finally up: his words lack authority; they carry no more weight than if spoken by any predacious degenerate born and raised in this blighted section of town.
Deciding it best to keep his mouth shut, he uses simple hand gestures to direct the driver deeper into the city’s most destitute and ungovernable quarters, an anxious journey without compass or charts. De Vere probes every garbage-strewn corner, every shuttered window, every dangerous alley. Things are desolate now, but it’s only a matter of time before the crazies, decked out in wild costumes, emerge from their shanties and squalid apartment blocks to celebrate under the power lines and behind the chain-linked fences crowned with barbed wire. It’s Halloween, a night sacred to the unhinged mind, but de Vere now sees a deeper pattern and believes it doesn’t matter what day or hour it happens to be. They are everywhere, these lunatics, a never-ending parade of human ruin, a plague cast down from heaven in a way that hints at God’s indifference to the world.
“It is unusually quiet this evening,” says the driver, his eyes nervously scanning the streets.
De Vere tries to suppress a knowing smile. Soon this little preserve will be positively teeming with game, and the idea—of a hunter and his quarry—makes himwonder if in a former life he had been a gentleman of quality who frequented the private hunting grounds of the king, invited by His Majesty to a country chateau to spend holidays shooting impressive white-tailed stags and, at day’s end, violating young wenches behind a stand of blue pines.
De Vere’s wife is convinced that he is an old soul, that he has undergone innumerable incarnations as insect, beast, vassal, and lord. “You’re afflicted with the
The Deer Park
I
An abrupt rush of cold air whistles through the front window of the cab, wrenching Edward de Vere from his gloomy ruminations. The driver, wreathed in silver smoke, clamps the smoldering butt of a cigarette between his tragic stumps of teeth and makes another small adjustment to the rearview mirror.
“You do not mind?”
De Vere shakes his head. No, the smoke doesn’t bother him, not terribly. After the violent confrontation that morning with his thieving son and the subsequent argument with his wife about the family’s financial troubles, de Vere discovers that he has become almost completely numb to pain, to pleasure, to the unvarying drone of his own thoughts.
From the pocket of his camelhair coat, he retrieves the flask inscribed with his initials (a gift from an utterly forgettable mistress), and with a wistful smile, takes a healthy swig of absinthe. De Vere has come to rely on the stuff. The effects are strictly spiritual of course, not particularly good for his ulcer or for his reasoning faculties, enemies of the mystical experience, but somehow it makes these evenings a little more interesting, less predictable. The liquor sears his esophagus, ignites the walls of his gut, spreads like a vast oil plume across the surface of his consciousness, illuminating the murkiest depths of his soul with tongues of Pentecostal fire. He relishes the sensation.
“Where are you going tonight, sir?” asks the driver.
“Oh, nowhere in particular.”
Because he doesn’t want to sound like just another slurring drunk in the back of a cab during the midnight hours, de Vere lifts his chin, purses his lips, and attempts to enunciate each syllable, each hard consonant, and nasally vowel, but he stumbles over that last word—
par-tic-u-lar
—and realizes, with some chagrin, that he can no longer disguise his old accent, can’t soften the working class cadences that for so many years marked him as a poseur. Lost is the patrician affectation he has fine-tuned since his days as a student at the Jesuit school. The ruse is finally up: his words lack authority; they carry no more weight than if spoken by any predacious degenerate born and raised in this blighted section of town.
Deciding it best to keep his mouth shut, he uses simple hand gestures to direct the driver deeper into the city’s most destitute and ungovernable quarters, an anxious journey without compass or charts. De Vere probes every garbage-strewn corner, every shuttered window, every dangerous alley. Things are desolate now, but it’s only a matter of time before the crazies, decked out in wild costumes, emerge from their shanties and squalid apartment blocks to celebrate under the power lines and behind the chain-linked fences crowned with barbed wire. It’s Halloween, a night sacred to the unhinged mind, but de Vere now sees a deeper pattern and believes it doesn’t matter what day or hour it happens to be. They are everywhere, these lunatics, a never-ending parade of human ruin, a plague cast down from heaven in a way that hints at God’s indifference to the world.
“It is unusually quiet this evening,” says the driver, his eyes nervously scanning the streets.
De Vere tries to suppress a knowing smile. Soon this little preserve will be positively teeming with game, and the idea—of a hunter and his quarry—makes himwonder if in a former life he had been a gentleman of quality who frequented the private hunting grounds of the king, invited by His Majesty to a country chateau to spend holidays shooting impressive white-tailed stags and, at day’s end, violating young wenches behind a stand of blue pines.
De Vere’s wife is convinced that he is an old soul, that he has undergone innumerable incarnations as insect, beast, vassal, and lord. “You’re afflicted with the
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