Bullet Park

John Cheever

Bullet Park

The Temple Of Light

"Are you the holy man?" Hammer asked.

"Oh no, no indeed. I've never claimed to be that. You must excuse me. I am very tired tonight."

"You cure the sick?"

"Sometimes, sometimes. I help with prayers but I am so tired tonight that I ca

"You remember Tony Nailles?"

"Yes."

"I am going to kill him," Hammer said. "I am going to burn him on the altar of Christ's Church."

"Get out of here," the swami said. "Get out of the Temple of Light."

To

Robert and Susan Cowley

PART 1

I

Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark. Beyond the platform are the waters of the Wekonsett River, reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture of the station is oddly informal, gloomy but unserious, and mostly resembles a pergola, cottage or summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along the platform burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness. The setting seems in some way to be at the heart of the matter. We travel by plane, oftener than not, and yet the spirit of our country seems to have remained a country of railroads. You wake in a pullman bedroom at three a.m. in a city the name of which you do not know and may never discover. A man stands on the platform with a child on his shoulders. They are waving goodbye to some traveler, but what is the child doing up so late and why is the man crying? On a siding beyond the platform there is a lighted dining car where a waiter sits alone at a table, adding up his accounts. Beyond this is a water tower and beyond this a well-lighted and empty street. Then you think happily that this is your country-unique, mysterious and vast. One has no such feelings in airplanes, airports and the trains of other nations.

A train arrives, a passenger departs and is met by a real-estate agent named Hazzard, for who else will know the exact age, usefulness, value and well-being of the houses in the town. "Welcome to Bullet Park. We hope you'll like it well enough to join us here." Mr. Hazzard does not happen to live in Bullet Park. His name, like that of every other licensed real-estate dealer, is nailed to the trees in vacant lots, but he transacts his business in a small office in the next village. The stranger has left his wife in the Hotel Plaza, watching television. The search for shelter seems to him to go on at a nearly primordial level. Prices are high these days and nothing is exactly what one wants. The scuffed paint and discarded portables of earlier owners seem as alive and demanding as the clothing and papers one sorts out after a death in the family. The house or the flat that he looks for, he knows, will have had to have appeared at least twice in his dreams. When it is all over, when the gardens are planted and the furniture is settled, the rigors of the journey will have been concealed; but on this evening the blood-memory of travel and migrations courses through his veins. The people of Bullet Park intend not so much to have arrived there as to have been planted and grown there, but this of course was untrue. Disorder, moving vans, bank loans at high interest, tears and desperation had characterized most of their arrivals and departures.

"This is our commercial center," says Hazzard. "We have all sorts of plans for its improvement. There's Powder Hill," says Hazzard, nodding towards a lighted hill on their right. "There's a property there I'd like to show you. The asking price is fifty-seven thousand. Five bedrooms, three baths…" The lights of Powder Hill twinkled, its chimneys smoked and a pink plush toilet-seat cover flew from a clothesline. Seen at an improbable distance by some zealous and vengeful adolescent, ranging over the golf links, the piece of plush would seem to be the imprimatur, the guerdon, the accolade and ba

But the adolescent, as adolescents always are, would be mistaken. Take the Wickwires, for instance, whose white house (estimated resale price: $65,000) Hazzard and the traveler were passing. If the social customs of Powder Hill were to be attacked by the adolescent the Wickwires would make a splendid target. They were charming, they were brilliant, they were incandescent, and their engagement calendar was booked solid from Labor Day to the Fourth of July. They were quite literally social workers-celebrants-using their charm and their brilliance to make things go at a social level. They were people who understood that cocktails and di

Their brilliance, their ardor as celebrants, is serious. After any common weekend when they have lunched and dined out for three days ru