Count Geiger's Blues Read online

  Top of the ninth, it looked as if the Cherokees might win. A Cardinals batter fouled a pitch down the third-base line, and Xavier saw that it would hit Bryan—with the full force of a hard liner—if he didn’t act.

  He shoved Donel aside and caught the ball in his left hand an instant before it would have shattered Bryan’s cheekbone. The stinging impact of the drive staggered him. He clutched a seat back to keep from falling on Bryan, who’d spilled beer on his trousers but who was otherwise unhurt.

  “Sign him up!” a few fans screamed. The PA announcer boomed that a rep from the Cherokees’ front office would wade into the stands to offer him a contract.

  “Wow,” Donel said. “Who’d’ve thunk it?”

  “Thank you,” Bryan said. “Thank you. I really mean it: Thank you.”

  “Am I the Wuss of the Western World?” Xavier asked. “Did my catch seem that miraculous?”

  They said, No, no, it didn’t—but clearly they saw his split-second grab, and the fact that he’d managed not only to keep the ball from hitting Bryan but to catch it bare-handed, as a fluke. Of course, he’d never played handball with either of them—a game at which he was very good—and neither knew that while at Vanderbilt he had won the five-hundred-meter butterfly at the annual SEC swim meet. Hell, even Nietzsche knew that the best physiological condition for those striving toward the type of the Superman is “great healthiness.” He also hiked and camped. It was group sports that he loathed.

  The Cherokees won by two runs.

  On the way to the parking lot, a man in a ribbed tank top and sneakers shoved Xavier in the back, picked up the baseball he’d caught, and darted off between the parked cars like a nimble rabbit. “Hey!” Donel shouted. “Hey! Come back!”

  “Never mind,” Xavier said. “No great loss.” If the baseball had meant anything to him, he would have chased the thief. And despite Donel and Bryan’s evident assumption that he was no athlete, he would have run the jerk down and reclaimed the stolen ball. But the ball meant nothing to him, and the effort would have been wasted.

  At Bryan’s little red Porsche, it pained Xavier, almost as much as it pained Bryan, to discover that a vandal had torn off the rearview mirror and bludgeoned the hood and fenders with a tire iron, confirming Xavier in his opinion that anyone who owned a car in the city was courting both headache and heartbreak.

  “Oh, shit!” Bryan cried. “Why? Why?”

  Because we’re in Salonika, Xavier thought, and Salonika, like every big city, is a dung heap that attracts and feeds millions of poisonous flies. Aloud, he said, “Maybe we should have gone to the flute recital at Sycamore First Presbyterian.”

  “You’ve got insurance, don’t you?” Donel said. Bryan said he did. “Buck up, then. Mr. Thaxton just saved you from reconstructive plastic surgery, and the Cherokees flummoxed the Cardinals. Don’t let a couple of dents in a your car—a material object, for heaven’s sake—put you in a funk. Buck up, buck up.”

  Xavier was surprised—astonished—that this admonition worked. Bryan’s mood improved, and they concluded their evening by driving to the Oconee Plaza Hotel and listening to an adept black pianist in its well-appointed lounge play Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Duke Ellington.

  3

  A Dream of Plant VanMeter

  Every July in the small Oconee township of Placer Creek, in the mirage-blue mountains ninety miles northeast of Salonika, Phosphor Fog Community College sponsors its annual George Bernard Shaw Drama Festival & County Crafts Fair. This event began in 1975, and it has been so successful, drawing visitors from many foreign lands and nearly every state in the Union, that its organizers believe it will go on forever.

  The crafts fair isn’t remarkable, particularly in Dixie, where such fairs take place nearly every summer weekend. What sets apart the Phosphor Fog Festival & Fair is not the rosin potatoes bubbling in tarry kettles, the scrimshawed jewelry and the antique furniture on sale, or the bluegrass music wafting through the oak groves—but the performances of five or six different G. B. Shaw plays over a six-week stretch beginning on the Fourth of July and continuing into August.

  Performances take place in the Phosphor Fog Community College Fine Arts Auditorium or at the Oconee Mountain Amphitheater, in a natural bowl between two small hills. One new American play is produced each summer (along with the obligatory, hugely popular, Shavian fare) mostly to counter the charge that putting on only the works of a dead socialist Brit is unfair to Southern American playwrights. The actors are always professionals or talented college drama students selected by famous Broadway or London directors. Securing tickets to the festival has become an exciting in-thing hassle not only in the Southeast, but also in New York City and Los Angeles.

  *

  Four years after snagging that foul ball and a year before our story’s main events, Xavier attended the G. B. Shaw Drama Festival & Country Crafts Fair in Placer Creek.

  As drama critic on his Fine Arts staff, Ivie Nakai had expected to go. Ivie, a bright Japanese-American, had joined the Urbanite out of the University of Georgia—to replace the retiring Cliff Todd. Although a novice, she was hurt that Xavier had picked this plum assignment for himself. Two years ago, she’d acted in the GBS Festival, then written a prize-winning story about it for the student newspaper, The Red and Black.

  “Can’t we both go?” she asked Xavier. “They double-track the plays up there. It’ll cut your reviewing load in half if I go with you.”

  “The Urbanite won’t foot the bills for two reporters, Ivie.”

  “This newspaper syndicate makes caboodles. My going to Placer Creek wouldn’t squeeze it at all!”

  Most novices weren’t so persistent. But Ivie had passion as well as credentials, and Xavier was reminded, inevitably, of a passage from Thus Spake Zarathustra: “I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.”

  But so did he, and seniority counted for something.

  “Listen, Ivie, it’s not the money. The week I’m gone, two new productions of classic plays will open here in Salonika.”

  Ivie studied him warily. “What are they?”

  “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by the Proscenium Players and Arsenic and Old Lace at Under Southern Stars.”

  “Aaaaaiiii!” groaned Ivie Nakai. “Aaaaaiiii!”

  *

  In Placer Creek, Xavier forgot Ms. Nakai’s anguish and enjoyed excellent stagings of Major Barbara, Back to Methusela, The Devil’s Disciple, Saint Joan, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and Pygmalion. The new American play was a (superbly acted) turkey about machine intelligence, a crippled French space station, and an aging hippie activist trying to recover the star-creating inner chaos of his youth. As bad as this play was, it did not taint the pleasure Xavier took from the vintage dramas by Shaw.

  Between plays, Xavier hiked part of the Phosphor Fog Trail and fingered the first editions in the antique shops on Placer Creek’s main street. He ate vegetarian meals at Pamela’s Boarding House, panned for gold in a stream near one of the hills forming the Oconee Mountain Amphitheater, and lay in bed one evening—a four-poster feather bed, with a calico canopy—listening to the summer thunder and watching fantastic zigzags light up not only the hilltops beyond the boarding house but also the abstract arabesques of the wallpaper.

  Nietzsche had been sick much of his life—a man for whom the ideal of “great healthiness” had been a fleeting will-o’-the-wisp, but he too had had moments like this, moments of exaltation that redeemed the brain-racking agony of his work.

  SIZZLE! CRACK! BOOM!

  This is how the Life Force flows, Xavier thought, wriggling his toes under the sheet—and how it renews us. He thought then not of another passage from Zarathustra but of some telling lines from the poetry of Dylan Thomas: “The force that drives the water through the rocks / Drives my red blood.”

  *

  After the festival, Xavier got into his rented car (he hated to drive, but you couldn’t hail a
cab in the Phosphor Fogs) and headed not toward Salonika—with its inescapable air of disintegrating civilization—but deeper into the mountains in quest of a Nietzschean solitude that would heal his neglected Life Force.

  Grantham wasn’t looking for him until late the next afternoon, and Pamela—of Pamela’s Boarding House—had told him how to get to a clear-water spring seldom visited by tourists. He might be able to take a moonlight swim there without disturbing anyone or being disturbed.

  By seven that evening, he had found the spot, a limestone sink at the base of a wooded cliff well back from the highway. An old mill had stood downstream from the pool into which this icy spring emptied, but it hadn’t operated for years. Now, it was only weathered timbers and rotten paddles: a picturesque ruin.

  Xavier parked above the mill, carried a picnic basket down a path tangled with blackberry vines, and ate dinner on a rock ledge over the spring, nibbling Gouda cheese and sourdough bread and sipping a good but inexpensive Chardonnay.

  He had a nylon tent in his rental car, the sort that can be pitched by snapping out its aluminum supports into a miniature Hemisphere. Xavier decided to swim, camp on the rock ledge, and swim again in the morning. Then he’d get his gear and begin the two-hour drive back to Salonika. Afterward, a whole day to rest up at home before returning to the dayroom—no rush. Journalistically speaking, The GBS Drama Festival was small potatoes, ranking well below a sex scandal featuring a senator or a televangelist.

  Later, tipsy from the wine, Xavier went skinnydipping, the water clear as glass and almost as sharp. Swimming in it was like drinking white lightning chilled in dry ice. Going under the spring’s surface was like closing your mouth on a stick of licorice and opening it on vacuum. Bubbles rippled over Xavier’s body like fresh 7Up, astonished minnows fled from him like glassy-blue match flames, and a slow-coiling eel hung before him as if trapped in gelatin—a weird eel, uncannily long, with eye spots as red as poppies and a feathery violet dorsal fin.

  Xavier broke the surface. Were electric eels a freshwater fauna? Nope. The eel might bite him, but it wouldn’t discharge thousands of volts into his helpless body. Hell, it must be scared of him. A little thrashing about would frighten it away and get his own sluggish blood moving. He butterflied across the spring, dolphin-kicking and looping his arms in and out of the water. Soon, he had neutralized the cold and driven off the eel.

  “The force that drives the water through the rocks / Drives my red blood.”

  Xavier rolled to his back. The oblate moon shone down, silvering the pool, like a radioactive skull—maybe Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche envied him both this lovely experience and his “great healthiness.”

  Out of the water, Xavier donned shorts and set up his tent. Crouched beside it, he heard a splash from the rock pool: a loud splash. He grabbed his flashlight and shone it on the water. Another splash, just as loud! This time he saw an odd creature leap from the bank to the pool. A muskrat? Xavier crossed the ledge and peered down into the weeds growing out of the jumble of rocks beside the water.

  His flashlight’s beam picked out a shape that experience and memory told him was that of, well, a frog. A bullfrog. An enormous bullfrog. As big as a well-fed house cat. He had heard of an African variety of frog that grew even larger than these frogs had grown, but he’d never seen one in the States, and the appearance of this frog, glistening a faint emerald-grey in the flashlight’s cone and the eerie wash of the moonlight, gave Xavier the shivers. He stared and stared. Finally, the third, and last, bullfrog plunged into the water, throwing up spray and disappearing into the dark mirror of the pool. A dream? Xavier went back to his tent and lay down.

  He soon fell asleep, on the still warm slab of the rock ledge. Owls hooted, bats twittered, treefrogs chuckled. Eventually, even Tarzan could not have been more at home in the jungle than Xavier was here in the Phosphor Fogs. Then, he dreamt. His dream had the stark suprareality that well-made horror movies sometimes have, and he woke unsure whether he was awake—Friedrich, I’m not a sleeper—or still under the spell of his subconscious. He crawled out of his tent in his shorts, looked at the sky, now moonless, and saw that under the stars hung a glowing membrane, a thin airy scarf occupying a part of the sky just over the rotting mill, the hidden spring, and some of the nearby forest. In addition to this glow, Xavier noticed a prickling of his scalp and skin, as if microscopic mites had hopped onto his body to feast on him. It didn’t hurt, this prickling, but it burned a little: a peculiar sensation. The Phosphor Fogs were notorious for causing unsuspecting tourists to hallucinate.

  July or no, it was too cold to swim. Xavier put on his boots, pulled on a shirt, and found some stepping stones in the stream. On the other side, he climbed through a maze of blackberry vines and trees to a dirt roadway. He hiked it, two ruts in an open-topped tunnel, until the sky-glow led him to an overlook above eight concrete towers resembling huge termitaria. The light staining the sky here, sending its tendrils into the adjacent Phosphor Fogs on plumes of steam, was urine-colored, a sickly yellow, the product of hundreds of smoky arc lamps. It was nothing like the glow Xavier had seen earlier, but it came from the same place where that other bleak shimmering had originated, i.e., here at this half-hidden power station.

  The “termitaria” were cooling towers for the nuclear reactors. Xavier gazed down on Plant VanMeter, built by Consolidated Tri-State to serve major parts of Tennessee, Georgia, and Oconee. Despite protests, the plant had come on line, as scheduled, the same spring Xavier joined the Salonika Urbanite. Here, on the edge of Phosphor Fog National Park, it had run efficiently ever since.

  The plant was walled, fenced, moated.

  Tonight, it looked like a set from a horror film about the crematoria in Hades. In fact, Xavier saw an army of figures in white masks, caps, and suits swarming around the hourglass towers. A helicopter eggbeatered above. A man shouted instructions through a megaphone at the swarming workers. But Xavier could hear no cries, no rotors. Had cold spring water rendered him deaf? Along with the plant’s eerie yellow glow, its dreamlike silence unnerved him. He gripped his elbows, scratching his upper arms to ease the prickling-tingling-burning there. He wasn’t deaf. He could hear his fingernails scraping skin, his own ragged breathing, and the forest’s night noises. He also heard a man on the ridgetop fifty yards away: “Hey, dude, what’re you doing up here?”

  Nothing, Xavier thought. Just gawping. Just wondering about my selective deafness. Still, he felt guilty. And when this man, a helmeted security worker, yelled again, Xavier bolted. He darted back into the trees and, from their cover, followed the roadway until he could hear the creek. Winded, he knelt, scratched and bleeding, among blackberry vines until certain that nobody was coming. Then he forded the stream and scrambled back to the ledge on which he’d set up camp. There, he removed his shirt, moistened it, dabbed at his wounds, and crept back into his tent. He no longer cared about that queer shimmering just under the stars. His cuts’ sting had replaced the tingling that had earlier mystified him. He lay down on the rock and slept until morning.

  When he awoke, Xavier knew that something odd had happened. On the other hand, he didn’t know if he had dreamed his trek to Plant VanMeter or if he had really gone there—only to be run off by a guard and his own needless guilt. The cuts that had seemed so bad last night looked, now, like ordinary scratches. Perhaps he had gotten them hiking between the mill and this spring.

  Light began to fill the Phosphor Fogs. Xavier had no desire to swim again. People would soon be along, tourists or a forest ranger or some local hillbillies or—if he hadn’t dreamed the whole episode—a few inquisitive power-plant guards.

  “Light am I: ah, that I were night! But it is my lonesomeness to be begirt with light!” (Nietzsche again.) Last night, Nietzsche had smiled down from the moon, but now he was lost in sunlight, and these words from “The Night-Song” seemed to be advising Xavier to run to darkness again.

  He gathered up his gear and drove nonstop, in less than two hours, from the mo
untains of north Oconee to his high rise in Salonika. Then he sat in a wing chair, curtains drawn, listening repeatedly to a recording of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 in E Minor.

  4

  Consolidated Tri-State Meets the Press

  “The pretty guys from the networks will be down here en masse,” Walt Grantham was saying when Xavier entered the dayroom. “And Consolidated Tri-State’s doing its utmost to stonewall everybody.”

  A tight chaos seethed from floor to floor through the Ralph McGill Building. Telephones rang, reporters zigzagged between desks, a TV monitor on a support column sustained a small crowd of journalists with no direct involvement in the story that had just broken.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Later,” Walt Grantham said. “Glad you’re back—but later, Xavier, later.”

  Lee Stamz grabbed Xavier and maneuvered him into a partitioned area given over to the staffs of the Entertainment and the Fine Art divisions of the Urbanite. Stamz was a black man in his late forties who’d played middle linebacker on the last Oconee State University football team to win the national championship. It was impossible to resist him when he leaned you the direction he wanted you to go.

  Stamz had an irresistible transitive lean. Bodyguards, bouncers, Secret Service men, and professional boxers would have paid small fortunes to attend a seminar on how to grow a lean as authoritative as the former All-American’s.

  “You really don’t know?” Stamz said, leaning Xavier into a swivel chair.

  “Con-Tri’s just had its own Chernobyl?”

  “It ain’t that bad.”

  “Three Mile Island, then?”

  “Despite the hoohah here, it don’t seem to me even a patch on that one. Hard to say, though. Con-Tri’s bigwigs are trying to contain things—more than the hot stuff from an auxiliary cooling tank that’s overflowed.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “A stranger in Placer County says yesterday morning, but she didn’t pick up on it until late yesterday evening. Grantham didn’t find out about it until she phoned him around four A.M. The dinks at WSSX learned of it before we did and sent a van to Placer Creek around one. If you’d been awake, you could’ve watched their live on-site ex-po-zay just when Grantham was finding out we’d been scooped by the vacuum tubes.”