All We Need of Hell Read online

  ALL WE NEED OF HELL

  A novel

  Harry Crews

  1987

  This book is for Maggie Powell.

  Mender of wings, restorer of flight, may you wheel

  and soar under the sun forever.

  Parting is all we know of heaven,

  And all we need of Hell.

  — Emily Dickinson

  1

  He was thinking of Treblinka. He had already finished with Dachau and Auschwitz. And now in an effort of will the images of death pumped in his head in a certain steady rhythm. Behind his pinched burning eyelids he saw a pile of frozen eyeglasses where they had been torn from the faces of long lines of men, women and children before they had been led into the gassy showers.

  “Daddy. Please, daddy. I love… love… love. But it hurts.”

  Her whispering voice impinged upon the images of death. He shook it off and concentrated on open pits of lime-covered bodies. Not even people anymore. Rather manikins out of some bankrupt department store. Starved to the point of caricature. But once men and women. Once somebody not unlike himself. He imagined himself in the shower. In the pit. In the slave-labor gangs.

  “You’re killing me.”

  Yes, and by God he would. He’d kill. He’d do anything. He would become a proficient murderer and thief. He saw his wasted, tragic figure stealing along in the shadows of death-camp barracks. He saw in his hands a single strand of thin wire, the death instrument.

  “Please. Please come.”

  Her hands were moving over his body. Stroking, pinching, caressing, probing. And she was begging. He had her where he wanted her. He had brought her to the place of pain and punishment. He relaxed his thighs, forced the muscles in his lower back to go flaccid.

  She was kissing his closed eyes, begging him to look at her. But he gripped his eyes tighter. He knew that trick. She’d only show him the deep pink inside her mouth. Make her tongue stand and work like a snake. So he shut out her voice and her body by slipping the garrote around the neck of a fellow prisoner and stealing his half-eaten potato. The prisoner’s gaspy choking breath mixed with her breath, became her breath. And the prisoner’s starving body entered her thrusting, magnificent thighs.

  He killed her where he rode her, there on the high crest of his passion. And when she was dead he twisted the half-eaten moldy potato out of her hand.

  “I guess you’re too young to remember Pathé News,” he said.

  They were through now. He was putting on his bicycle racing hat. Marvella lay exhausted on the bed. He had made her cry. But she was still beautiful. As always, he was vaguely insulted that she should remain so utterly beautiful after he had given her such pain, such a beating.

  “Pathé News,” she said, her voice numb with exhaustion.

  He could taste the moldy potato in his mouth. In the mirror, the red stripe on his hard bicycle racing hat was tilted at a cocky angle. He watched her in the mirror, her bemused gaze balancing delicately in his own. He tried to look savage.

  “We used to get the news at the neighborhood movie,” he said. “They told us everything. I loved it.” He had his jockstrap on now — a number ten medium — and was stepping into a pair of blue nylon shorts. She sat up in bed and watched him. “One disaster after another. Burning blimps. Collapsing buildings. Ships blowing up.”

  “It musta been something,” Marvella said.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and began lacing his blue leather Adidas shoes onto his feet. His eyes were still full of dying children and hopeless parents. He did not have to listen to hear the sound of the begging voices.

  The greatest was when they liberated the concentration camps.”

  He stood up and rolled on the balls of his feet.

  “My grandmother was German,” she said.

  “Great organizers, the Germans,” he said. “They had that whole country set up to kill.”

  “And it was on the Pathé News?”

  “Every bit of it on Saturday afternoons.”

  She watched him absently for a long moment and wondered in her heart what they had been talking about. There were whole afternoons when they would talk without her ever knowing what he was trying to say, or trying to get her to say maybe. There had been times at first when she had tried to get him to explain.

  “Sure,” he would say, “it’s just this simple.”

  Then he’d say something that made no sense at all, which did not bother her but infuriated him. It was in a way relaxing, though, because she never had to pay attention.

  “Saturdays were always cartoon time at my house,” she said.

  He turned angrily from his bicycle where it leaned against the closet door. “What?”

  “We watched cartoons on TV all day on Saturday.”

  He looked down at the bicycle chain he was locking around his waist. Ten pounds of the finest tempered steel. He was suddenly baffled. He had a three-hundred-dollar bicycle that weighed seventeen pounds. And a twenty-five-dollar chain that weighed ten. The bicycle was so expensive because it was so light. But because it was so expensive he had to have a heavy chain, one that would require a torch to cut. There were, after all, thieves in the world. And consequently everything seemed to cancel everything else out. But the relationship was not consequential. And he knew it. Thieves had nothing to do with it. He looked up and saw that she had started to chew gum in her slow contented beautiful way.

  “Well… well.” He was beside himself with anger. “Well, to hell with it!”

  Not a ripple of anything showed in her face. She just kept on chewing as he rolled his bicycle out into the middle of the room.

  “You’re probably right,” she said, getting off the bed. She took an apple from a dish by the window. “I could have used my mind better than that.”

  He watched her in a kind of ecstasy of loathing. The pearling window light cast her body long and delicious. Her pink tongue brought the gum wetly into her hand. Her white teeth shattered the apple. Little shards of juice flew brightly from her mouth. A tremble ran in his legs where the blood pumped. He knew her addiction to soap operas on afternoon TV. And she not only collected science fiction novels; she also read them. She enjoyed them. She said they made her think, which meant she was dumb in the gravest kind of way. Duffy himself was addicted to reading and in the constant company of books. But he never read science fiction, which he thought of as chewing gum for the mind.

  She was also a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Florida. It was said that she had the single most brilliant graduate record ever made in the history of the department. But only something very dumb could chew gum like that. Only the most brutal kind of ignorance could talk the way she did. He couldn’t prove it. He just knew it. It was all mixed together in there then, her graduate record and her bovine dumbness. The heavy chain and the light bicycle all over again.

  “You coming back?” she said.

  “Can’t you remember any fucking thing?”

  “Remember?”

  “Yes. Remember.”

  “What?”

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “Duffy, you say the strangest old thangs.”

  Duffy sighed. “To answer your question, no, I’m not coming back. Not today anyway.”

  “When you think?” She may be a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, but she had never completely lost the cadences of Alabama where they named their daughters things like Marvella. And even better, she had a brother named Roid. Duffy had heard her talk about him for a long time before he realized that she was not saying Roy. He asked her to spell it for him. She had.

  Roid, for God’s sake. Was that an affectionate diminutive for hemorrhoid? He decided that it probably was. But even if it wasn’t, what a wonderful thing for a brother and sister to be named Marvella and Roid. And to be from Alabama. The rest of the country may have been homogenized, but the South held on to their Marvellas and their Roids and their ways of talking. Marvella would never sound like a goddam radio announcer. He could love her for that. That if for nothing else.

  “When you think?” she said again.

  “Probably a week, maybe two. Whenever we get back to town.”

  “I forgot. You’re taking Tish and the kid on a little vacation.”

  Christ, he thought, she’s going to eat another fucking apple, her third. She drove Tish’s name through the red skin, into the seedy core. A little froth of spittle and juice stood in the corner of her indifferent mouth.

  “She and the boy may not go with me. But I’m sure as hell going.” He was doing rapid knee bends on his bowed, muscled legs. He was bored with the conversation. He could feel the handball and gloves throbbing in his back pocket. His own palms were turning hot, smarting where they rested lightly on the taped handlebars. He slipped his tinted goggles down off his bicycle racing hat. The room darkened from behind the goggles. She stood by the window, a purple shadow with white chewing teeth.

  “Tish still giving you a hard time, is she?” She spat the pulpy core into her hand and popped the chewing gum back into her mouth.

  “Leave Tish out of this.”

  “I wish to goodness we could,” Marvella said. “Tish doesn’t know a good thing when she’s got it.”

  Duffy said: “Tish knows exactly what she’s got.”

  “Then I don’t see the problem.”

  “Nobody’s satisfied,” he said, pushing his bike to the door.

  “I guess not,” she said.

  He stopped at the door. “Actual
ly I think Hitler was satisfied, at least there for a while,” he said, not looking at her. “But even if they hadn’t stopped him, he would’ve run out of Jews and Gypsies sooner or later.”

  “Hitler was a beast,” she said. “An evil beast.”

  Duffy turned on her, his face flushing in anger. “Save that shit for somebody else. My daddy fought the bastard. He flew twenty-seven goddam missions before…”

  “Duffy, don’t start with My Father the Pilot. Not now.”

  He was suddenly calm. “Right. Not now. Not ever again. It’s all wasted on you anyway.”

  2

  He lifted the bike with one hand and opened the door with the other. With the crossbar of that sweet machine over his shoulder, he sprinted down five flights of outside stairs — outside even though this was a modern apartment house of neo-Aztec design that passed for elegance here in Gainesville, Florida, all angles and rough edges of poured cement — down the stairs to the street. The morning was brilliant, so blue that the air shimmered with palpable intensity.

  The deserted Sunday streets were heated up, wavering, becoming unsubstantial under a sun that rode his back like a weight. He hesitated at the curb, feeling good, his skin popping with a thin sweat. The bicycle under his hands felt brittle as the bones of a sparrow. He let the alloy frame come into his wrists and forearms, move to his shoulders and back, while he stood very still, safe behind the tinted goggles, safe in the hard pulsing body he had built as deliberately and carefully as a mason builds a wall. His hard supple ankles rolled delicately under pointed calves that melded in a single flow of muscle to thighs that could do ten deep squats with three hundred pounds, exactly twice his body weight. His legs wanted the bicycle. If they had a voice they would have screamed for it.

  Then, in a movement like a bird taking flight, he saddled the bicycle with himself. His feet went true to the stirrups, strapped in tight and sure; his calloused hands took the taped grips; his narrow rocklike buttocks did not so much sit as lean on the leather seat. He was balanced on three points of equal weight — hands, feet, buttocks — and his begoggled face, grinning madly, split the air. The thick black hair curling from under the helmet stood straight behind him like a banner. He shot up through the gears to tenth and back down to his cruising gear, seventh.

  Now he set himself to possess the bicycle, possess it all over again, each time a new time, and dangerous in what it cost him, but not because he might get hurt. He had been hurt doing everything he had ever done. He expected it, even wanted it. Nothing centered a man like pain. Nothing drove the irrelevant bullshit out of your mind like the taste of your own blood. Duffy always wanted to tell people who were worried about the future of their children, or about God and the order of the universe, to go out and break a rib or two. A few broken ribs threw all thoughts of children, God and the order of the universe right out the window. Nobody with broken ribs ever had free-floating anxiety, or so Duffy was convinced. It was cheaper than a psychiatrist and never so humiliating.

  He was riding a handmade Gitane Tour De France ten-speed touring machine with an enclosed Simplex derailleur and hand- sewn paper-thin racing tires that went flat every night and had to be pumped up every morning. The tires, like everything else about the Gitane, were an inconvenience he suffered in order to ride the best. The rims were not steel but an alloy, and therefore lighter than steel but at the same time more likely to be damaged by rocks and holes in the road. But no matter, steel was too heavy. Alloy meant speed, maneuverability, so he tried to avoid rocks and holes with the sure and certain knowledge that sooner or later he would not be able to, and consequently ruin the bike and himself. But it would not be consequential. That was what he knew. Sooner or later the bike would be ruined. It had nothing to do with rocks and holes. What it had to do with was the fact that the world was a very dangerous place for any living thing, a simple self-evident truth that everyone Duffy had ever known had tried to deny. Except his father. Anytime Duffy cared to listen, he could hear his father’s hoarse, beseeching voice: “Embrace what cannot be changed. Hug it to yourself and make it your own.” Duffy had taken him at his word and embraced the world with a vengeance, or at least he hoped that he had.

  The gearshifts were not on the crossbar, as they were on other bikes. He had modified it so that the gear for the front two-speed sprocket was at the left end of the handlebar and the gear for the back five-speed sprocket was at the right end of the handlebar. That way his hands never had to move when he was sprinting. Without ever leaving the taped grips, he worked the gearshifts with his little fingers. He let both little fingers touch the gears now although he did not mean to shift. He only wanted to make himself feel the taut thin steel cables humming down the handlebars and down the angled crossbar and down the joining H bar to the Simplex derailleur. He did not want himself and the Gitane (feminine form of the French word for Gypsy) to be separate. As he did before a karate match, he let his mind fill with light, the source of which was invisible, a slightly blue room covered with mirrors reflecting nothing. He always used techniques from one art to inform another art.

  “A man doesn’t have twenty different disciplines, or thirty-five, or a hundred,” he often told his son. “It is all one discipline. A solid tempered thing at the center of a man that is indestructible. The mystery that keeps you alive if you’ve got it, or that lets you die if you don’t.”

  The girl was an art every bit as much as karate or cycling. Fucking was just another workout. But because it was didn’t mean it couldn’t be raised to the level of art. Any craft could. It only required knowledge and concentration. He often thought fucking ought to be included in the Olympics. Judged on difficulty and variety of positions and how smoothly the positions were integrated. The ultimate dance. Nothing could be faked. When the judge clapped his hands and cried: At the ready! Set! Penetrate! you either had it up or you were disqualified. A live audience of seventy thousand people and millions more on world television would watch as the sheep were separated from the goats. A million suburban husbands, jaded, potbellied, a cold beer by the chair, would watch with their hearts in their throats. And he, absolutely poised and ready, would bring them to their feet with his performance. Only victory, winning in the moment, made the knowledge of ultimate failure and death bearable. It often occurred to him that it was all probably meaningless anyway, a kind of game. But if it took a game to keep him alive, so be it. Whatever was necessary was necessary. Again, he could hear the mad voice of his father: “I’m alive, am I not? Alive!” Duffy would do anything to win, just as he had this morning with Marvella.

  He hadn’t meant to think of the Nazis and their experiments in death. But he had felt himself on the edge of coming, and the mountain of frozen eyeglasses popped into his head. The wonderful images of death. The gas. The screams. And he knew she would not beat him. He’d take her where he wanted her to go. But not without a price. All the trouble he had gone to to have that twenty-two-year-old girl locked up with him, only to find she had brought a corpse with her. A girl for his body and a corpse for his head. Everything canceled everything else out. It was a situation he thought he could understand and that struck him as nothing more than a commonplace.

  And he was left with what he was always left with: his body’s enthusiasm. It was all he ever felt safe with. You could, after all, measure that, understand the failure, control the performance. If you were willing to pay the price you could make your body do anything. Nobody knew what it could be made to do. Hadn’t everybody assumed that a four-minute mile was impossible? And when Roger Bannister’s body paid the price, how long did his fact, his record, stand? Seventeen days. Less than three weeks later another man’s body, with four stopwatches on it, produced its own miracle and there went poor old Roger down the drain. Now there was not a class miler in the world who didn’t own a four-minute mile. Discipline. Price. The body’s enthusiasm. That was probably where God lived, in a hot muscle strained beyond its limits.

  He was passing a Volkswagen now. Out of the sides of his tinted goggles he saw the startled driver blink in disbelief. He held his body in a perfect wind scoop, head low, eyes just above the handlebars, back flat across the shoulders and rising to the curve that the wind passed over and then pushed against, knees very tight, only the width of the crossbar apart.