I DIED, SIR, IN FLAME, SIR

By Richard Bowes
 

The response we have had to Richard Bowes’ Kevin Grierson stories has been extremely positive. The first, “On Death and the Deuce,” (April, I992) has been sold to two best-of collections. The second, “The Beggar at the Bridge,” (December, 1993) and the third, “The Shadow and the Gunman” (February, 1994) have garnered a lot of word of mouth. “I Died, Sir, In Flame, Sir” is the fourth. We have another Grierson story in inventory.

All of the Kevin Grierson tales happen at a different point in Kevin’s life and hence stand alone. Rick is combining them all into a novel, Minions of the Moon, which promises to be as good as or better than the stories that inspired it.

* * * *

WEARING A WONDERFUL TURquoise blouse, Sarah Bryce Callendar opened the door of her guest room. Inside was a big bed with a soft comforter. A table and chest of drawers were set between two ten-foot-tall windows. “There’s space for you here, Kevin. I’d like you to stay.” Her auburn hair was long and worn loose.

The offer was not a surprise. Mutual friends had told me what to expect when they put the two of us back in touch. A few years before, Sarah and I had lived together to really bad effect. Clearly, this time, we would not be lovers. My bedroom was all the way across the loft from hers. Still, her kindness almost overwhelmed me. “Thanks for being able to forgive,” I managed to tell her.

“When I heard you had cleaned up and that you needed a place, I knew you were the one I wanted here. How soon can you move in?”

With just a moment’s chagrin at being thirty-plus and still scrounging for somewhere to live, I replied, “Tonight.”

Sarah took away the sting by saying, “Great,” and making it a business matter. “I understand you have to hold two jobs to get by. I’d like you to quit the weekend one. Room and board will be free. Since I can’t be here with Scotty Saturday and Sunday during the day, I’d especially like you to be around then. You heard why?”

“Something about your in-laws.”

“They’ve made noises about wanting custody of their only grandchild.”

Her son was over at a friend’s. His room was next to mine, its door open. I looked in on a nine-year-old’s lair and said, “What about Scott? I was pretty rough on him.”

“He still asks about you, Kevin.” Out in the main living area, a phone rang and Sarah went to answer it.

I looked around Scott’s room. A green plastic brontosaurus with bright red eyes was new to me. The diesel engine and battered cars, the handful of beaten up metal grenadiers, I recalled from my last stay. They were a legacy of Scott Callendar Senior. The tall chest in the comer was Sarah’s, come down to her from an ancestor who had been a ship’s captain. In gold paint on its dark front, chipped and scratched Chinese men in robes and wide hats poked at a porcupine with long sticks.

On the chair next to the bed were a couple of books open face down. One, a collection of rhymes called A Garland Knot for Children, seemed familiar. Picking it up, I saw inscriptions on the title page indicating that it had been in the Callendar family for generations. The Garland contained favorites like “Humpty Dumpty” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” along with items new to me such as “There Was a Lady Loved a Swine.”

The original artwork was wood cuts. But the book had gotten annotated over the years with crayon drawings and faded pencil scribbles of children now old or dead. My attention was caught by a brand new thumb-sized illustration in red, black, and yellow. I recognized Scott Junior’s work. The poem on that page went:

I CAME, SIR, FOR FAME, SIR,
THE SPOILS OF YOUR FAIR TOWN,
AND ‘TWAS STRANGE TO SEE, SIR,
THE WHOLE WORLD WAS WATCHING ME.
I DIED, SIR, IN FLAME, SIR.
THE OLD DEVIL TOOK ME DOWN.
IF YOU DOUBT ‘TIS TRUE, SIR,
YOU WON’T WHEN HE COMES FOR YOU.

At first, I thought he had drawn a match head. It took me a moment to realize it was a fiery motorcycle and rider. When Scott was two, his father had died on a flaming bike. Once, roaring drunk, I had described the accident to the kid. Obviously he had remembered.

The drawing evoked a chain of memories I would have preferred not to face. But I couldn’t do that. Part of staying sober involved my performing a kind of balancing act. I had to remember the past clearly but not let it control the present. Scott as a kid had no control over his present or his past. I turned away from his room resolved to repair what I had done.

In the rolling main area of her loft, the couches were draped with quilts in Southwestern motifs, samples for Sarah’s store. She told me, “I’m advised not to let Scott go visit for fear of not getting him back. It’s hard to make him understand why he can’t see his only grandparents. And even though I think they’re mighty creepy, I don’t like him to grow up hating them.

“Recently, I noticed a black van parked across the street and a guy in it just watching. A couple of times I spotted another man out back staring at this place. I feel like I’m under observation.”

The back windows looked out on a deserted Soho panorama of faded bricks and old wooden water towers. The roof behind was three floors down and separated from us by an alley. “Let’s see what happens,” I said, trying to sound wise and tough.

As she let me out, Sarah asked, “Remember Ian? You hated him, right? Well, he got real mean before he went back to England. Frankie you never met. Looked like a million bucks, had a million bucks, said he loved kids. After two months he was doubled over with back pain and screaming at us. I decided to take a long breath and think things over.” I thought she looked a little haunted as she told me that.

Down on the cobblestone street, I looked for the black van she had mentioned. In the September twilight, artists in work clothes smoked dope on a loading platform, a cluster of Spanish women headed home from the Triboro Pinking Shears Company.

When Sarah and her three-year-old son had settled into an empty factory floor, she had been a pioneer. By the mid-seventies, Manhattan south of Houston Street had started to boom, the World Trade Center twin towers were an eye-catching wonderment on the downtown skyline. But Fanelli’s Bar and the shops still closed in the evening, Despite grow lamps in loft windows, whole blocks of Soho could seem empty after dark.

Riding the IRT uptown, I thought about Sarah’s taste for guys who were flying off the beam, guys like her husband and me. Outside of that failing she was very successful. At twenty-three she had a child, lots of bills, and some connections among the Russian ladies who were quietly going blind embroidering blouses.

A couple of years later she had Callendar Days, a little store that got mentioned in the Times and New York Magazine. One Saturday afternoon when we two lived together, I staggered in there with a bloody nose. I had been supposed to take Scott to the zoo. But gin and rum and destiny played funny tricks. “I have people that I’m trying to wait on,” Sarah said and managed very expertly to maneuver me into the storeroom in the rear of the shop.

At a little desk in the comer Scott sat doodling with magic markers. “Your mother is pissed off at me,” I remarked, amazed that she couldn’t accept my simple gift of myself.

“That’s because you’re stoned,” he said like an adult explaining something to a child.

I begged to differ. “She’s afraid that everybody she gets involved with is going to kill themselves. Just like your father did.” Scott looked at me wide-eyed. His father’s death was an unspoken event in the household. Since this seemed like the perfect moment, I asked, “You know what happened to your old man?”

He shook his head and I told him, “One winter night, he dropped five thousand mc’s of untested California acid and took a motorcycle ride on Roosevelt Drive. He hit an ice patch and plowed into a bridge support. The gas tank blew up and he went over the side in a ball of flame. The bike was borrowed and the first thing your mother had to do was repay the owner.”

Scott ran past me with his head down so that I couldn’t see his face. On the desk was the Garland Knot, which I hadn’t noticed before. As I went to pick it up, Sarah came into the storeroom and said, “I can’t stand to see you this way, Kevin.” I told her a few things about herself. The next day, I moved out of the loft and went right down the tubes.

That happened very fast. My return trip was much slower. A man named Leo Dunn helped. No one can pull you out of the gutter. But when I finally decided I wanted to crawl out, he showed me how. His number was the lucky charm in my wallet. The evening of my reunion with Sarah, I called from a pay phone and told him what had happened. “That sounds like wonderful luck, my friend,” he said.

That was my thought also. I returned to the Abigail Adams Hotel at Thirty-Third and Lexington and packed my bags. As I did, some guy upstairs screamed like his teeth were being pulled. Then I walked out through a lobby full of hookers and took a cab downtown.

MY FIRST Saturday back in the loft was September bright. The TV was on in Scott’s room when I made my way to the kitchen. The two of us hadn’t spoken much since my return. Sarah went out the front door telling me, “This may be a late day.”

The kitchen contained potentially dangerous things, sharp knives, a small box of matches. None of them could do harm if they were left alone. While the tea brewed, my eyes were drawn to the cabinet where she kept liquor.

My last time in residence it had been a shrine for display of my totemic symbol, the empty booze bottle. Since then it had been restocked with name brands: Johnny Walker Red, Bombay Gin, Napoleon brandy, a few well chosen wines.

The night I showed up again Sarah had asked me if I wanted her to clear it out. I shook my head. “Booze will always be there,” Mr. Dunn once told me. “Get used to it. They won’t reinstitute the Volstead Act just for you and me.”

As I thought about that, Scott came out of his room and went to the refrigerator without saying anything. Pushing the dark hair from his eyes, he pulled out a giant Coke bottle, spun on one sneaker heel, hooked a mug off the shelf, and poured in one continuous action. As I sat wondering how to begin to untangle things, he saw me watching him. “Kevin?”

“Yeah?”

“Mom says you’re not drinking and stuff.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m glad.” Very solemnly, he came over to me and shook my hand.

“Me too,” I said, full of wonder at kids’ wisdom. “Listen, Scott, I’m sorry for a lot of things I may have said. About that last time in particular.”

I was prepared to go on. But Scott nodded and said, “Okay,” like the subject was closed and we were friends again.

That Saturday we had two adventures. The first began in Scott’s room shortly after our handshake. He held up a drawing of an Indian medicine man wearing a buffalo mask. The eyes behind the holes looked mean. “This is a Sioux,” he said. “I’m doing it for school You like him, huh?”

“It’s great. Especially the eyes.” I couldn’t find A Garland Knot for Children and wasn’t quite ready to ask. Suddenly, Scott turned toward the window and shouted. “There’s the guy Morn talks about!”

Looking out, I saw a man with wild gray hair staring up avidly, eyes hidden behind thick glasses. His wrinkled face reminded me of an old sponge. I recognized a chance for an easy triumph. “That’s TJ,” I said. “Let’s go talk to him.”

Without hesitation, Scott ran for his jacket. As we walked around the block, I remembered TJ. He had been a drinking companion of Jackson Pollock, friend of De Kooning. A couple of falls on the head had left him permanently dazed, a very abstract expressionist. “The guy’s an old time artist,” I told Scott.

On Greene Street directly behind Sarah’s place was a one-story converted garage. From my previous stay in the neighborhood, I knew that a bored old lady sculptor gave life drawing classes there on the weekends. She and TJ were a longtime item.

Everything worked perfectly. Scott and I arrived at the break. Students stood outside smoking, discussing art. Indoors, a young lady in a robe did flexing exercises to get her circulation back. I told the teacher, “Listen, we live on the next block. There’s a problem at the back of our building and we’d like to get up on your roof, take a look.”

She shrugged. We went up a flight of iron stairs, came out on the roof behind TJ. He was still looking up. Following his gaze, I saw what at first seemed like a stain on the wall next to Scott’s and my windows.

It took me a moment to decipher it. Pointing, I told Scott, “That’s an old advertising mural of some kind. The words are worn away. All that’s left of the ad is color, splotches of red and dying yellow, like a faded canvas.”

The artist turned around looking confused, a little embarrassed. “Good morning, TJ,” I said. “Looking at the mural?”

“I was.” He started walking away. “Fucking tourists,” he added in a toothless Loony Tunes delivery. I felt bad intruding on him that way. But Scott seemed fascinated. When we went back downstairs, the class had started again. He watched the nude model out of the comer of his eye.

Outside, Scott told me, “TJ is okay. Frankie always said he was going to find the guy, scare him away. But Frankie always got sick, had a bad back. He was an asshole.”

I had never met Frankie, but given what I knew of Sarah’s tastes that seemed not unlikely. We went home and had lunch: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches all around. “We can tell your mother she doesn’t have to worry about that.” I felt like I was earning my keep.

Scott nodded, one man of the world to another, then asked out of nowhere, “Do you remember the Islands Game?”

“I’m the one who showed it to you.” The kid amazed me. I had wondered how to bring up certain things that lay in Scott’s past. The Islands Game was the perfect way. “Let’s look at your toys. Got anything new?”

His room, with its wide expanse of floor, the light flooding in the windows, was an ideal playing area. Since I’d been gone, Scott had acquired a castle, a fine wooden structure with a drawbridge and some stalwart plastic knights to guard it. One knight appeared slightly fused like he might have been the victim of an experiment with fire.

Also present were a garage, a train station, what looked like the cabin of an antique Noah’s ark, toy trees, a train and tracks and blocks. “Plenty of blocks,” I said.

“Let’s make three islands,” Scott suggested. “And a boat.”

The game was evocative. As we set to work, I thought of Uncle Jamey teaching me the game when I was about ten. A long and dapper man, his hair the color of gray sand, he was my mother’s youngest uncle, over from Dublin for a family funeral. Stepping into my room, he saw me sitting alone among my possessions and said, “Ah, would you look at this!” Picking up a cannon, he asked, “Does it fire, now?” We talked for quite a while about my toys.

As mysterious to me as the death of the relative I hardly knew was the hostile chill in my parents’ house. A few days later when my mother had to be away, Uncle Jamey came back and spent an afternoon playing on the floor with me. I remember his breath flavored with whiskey and cigarettes as he said, “Those you have in your hand are Highlanders. Fierce fighters but unwitting tools of English Imperialism. Where shall we put them?”

“In the fort,” I answered. “You can be their leader if you want.”

“Thanks kindly. And where do we put the fort?”

“On this island. They’re hiding there because of the Indians and animals.”

“The garrison and I will hold out against the half-naked savages and wild lions,” said Uncle Jamey, who wrote for the newspapers back in Ireland. “And what will you be doing?”

“I’m this guy,” I said, producing a cowboy on a rearing horse. “He’s gonna lead the cavalry to rescue you. But he doesn’t know where you are. He starts way over on this other island. He doesn’t know you’re in danger.”

Mr. Dunn, who had taught me that I could never forget the past, also said that some memories were like land mines to be defused with great care. Kids are aware of everything and nothing. At ten, I knew that my mother and stepfather didn’t get along and that it was getting worse and worse. But, as kids do, I accepted that as normal.

By the time of the funeral, my stepfather was never around, my mother seemed very angry. I had questions about what was happening and, in Jamey, an adult who could have answered them. But I couldn’t find the words or the way to ask. While the two of them wound up their marriage, I was slaying lions, defeating Indians, rescuing Grand-Uncle Jamey.

As Scott and I built islands out of blocks, placed the buildings and trees on them, made a ship out of a shoe box, I remembered Jamey saying, “No one wins or loses the Islands Game.”

“What about the castle?” I asked.

“Ian made that the castle of the evil prince,” Scott said.

Jealousy rose in me. “He knew the game?”

“I showed it to him. He had to be the good knight and win.” He gestured toward the slightly melted figure. “He was an asshole.”

Ian had been my immediate successor and I couldn’t have agreed more.

“Did you show Frankie the game too?”

“One time. He wanted to be the American soldier and shoot everybody; then he hurt his back and couldn’t play.” Scott laid out the figures: the metal English guardsmen, one or two of whom had misplaced their heads, the knights, a dozen or so plastic Indians, several West Point Cadets, an outsize G.I. missing his rifle.

We even had civilians: a worn, ancient Mr. and Mrs. Noah, a little silver ballerina, Mickey Mouse dressed as a Keystone Cop, an armless china shepherdess, a small pair of pipe cleaner dolls in Mexican gear. Animals also appeared, a wooden hear and tiger left over from the Flood, assorted plastic cows and pigs, a camel from a nativity scene.

“The G.I. is on this island with the tiger,” I said. “He doesn’t know the war is over.” As I picked the figure up, I noticed a welt along its back.

Scott produced a chicken which laid white marble eggs and was bigger than a man mounted on a horse. “Maybe that can be the Roc. Its eggs are magic,” I suggested.

“It lives in the castle on the big island,” Scott added. He put the grenadiers in a boat. “These belonged to my father. This one is me.” He held up the officer. “I heard the legend. I’m sailing the boat looking for it.”

“I’m the captain of the ship.” I put a cadet on the bridge. “Whoever gets a Roc’s egg can ask any question he wants and the Roc will answer.” That was my own contribution to the game: the chance to ask a question.

Half the afternoon went in setting up the islands. The rest we spent moving the boat a couple of feet each turn, deciding where to land and what happened then. Scott as the Grenadier officer was brave yet merciful. I tagged along uttering an occasional “Avast there,” in my capacity as the ship’s captain. Between us, we played everyone else from the camel to Mrs. Noah.

From a position flat on the floor, I discovered again that furniture could be mountains, the ceiling sky. Holding a railroad engine in one hand, a cow in the other, I felt at once mouse and monster: in other words, nine years old. As the sun faded, Scott pushed the guardsmen and the Indians who had become their friends past the Ark cabin where the ballerina stood. “Because they helped her capture the bear,” I explained, “the silver goddess tells them about a secret entrance to the castle.”

With amazing ease Scott polished off the knights who were doing duty as the slave robots of the Roc. I sensed his great urgency. The final confrontation was anticlimactic. The grenadiers burst into the throne room, Scott pressed the Roc’s head and grabbed the egg.

“I get to ask it a question,” he said, “and it has to answer correctly.”

“Okay.”

Without even taking a deep breath, he asked, “Are Kevin and Mom going to start making it again?”

Instead of pretending to be the Roc, I answered him simply. “No chance at all. She’s letting me stay here for old times’ sake.”

Scott nodded seriously.

Then I moved the cadet/naval captain up to the throne, pressed the chicken’s head, and picked up the white glass egg. This seemed the right moment to ask, “What has become of the sacred lost book A Garland Knot for Children?”

Scott was startled. He shrugged and gave me a wide-eyed baffled look like I had asked the unknowable. “Hey,” I said, “the mystical and holy chicken has to answer.”

Scott was quick. He spoke into cupped hands for an echoing, oracle effect. “It’s gone to the land of dust bunnies and lost socks.” All I could do was laugh. Afterwards I looked again under his bed and behind the radiator.

When Sarah returned, Scott leaped up, saying, “Me and Kevin talked to that guy on the roof out back. He’s an old artist. He’s cool.”

Next I decided to see about the Van Man. My research job paid badly but was loosely structured. One morning at eight-thirty I sat at a front window and watched Scott get picked up for school. No van was in sight. A bit after ten, just as Sarah left to open her store, the black van pulled up across the street.

Van Man was a beefy, sullen guy in his thirties. He sat at the wheel staring as Sarah walked up to Houston Street. It was hard to blame him. Living on the downside, I had almost forgotten that people could move with her grace. Van Man watched other ladies too. After a while, he got out, loaded boxes from the back of the van onto a hand truck and headed down the block.

Very casually, I followed him over to De Luca’s on Prince Street. These days, Dean and De Luca’s is a huge upscale emporium on Broadway that sells coffee for a dollar a bean. Then, De Luca’s was a tiny shop offering the new residents of Soho good breads, fine cheese, and countermen who made sandwiches while singing belle canto in the manner of Maria Callas.

From them I found out about the Van Man. His name was Jay Imanella and he delivered farmer’s cheese his mother made. “Delivery days are the only time he gets away from her,” said a tall, bearded diva. “We call him The Merry Farmer because he isn’t. Usually we’re his last stop. If you’re really anxious to cruise him, he’s probably down the street tying one on.”

...