When they got to the beach it seemed like a perfect day. The sun was bright, the water was blue and scaled with the whitecaps of a brisk east wind. The tide was down, but rising, so they could still drive up and down the beach in Tee Jay’s good-looking car. Far out along the horizon clouds like dark bruises were massing and swelling, but they were a long way away. They drove up and down the beach a few times, slowly, just looking at the people, the children running and jumping and splashing and throwing sand, as shrill and swift as gulls, the muscular young men, bronzed and cocky, the girls in their bright bathing suits, and, too, the old people, the fat and the thin, misshapen and grotesque, sprawled under beach umbrellas, or burning lurid shades of pink in the sun. The men with mountainous stomachs and the little jiggly breasts like girls at puberty, and bandy, veined legs, and the women, thin and wrinkled as old, cracked leather, or enormous, all rippling, shaking bellies and buttocks, and great breasts sagging like overripe fruit, disgusted Naomi. She could not stand to look at them. They had a nerve, exposing themselves like that! Still, she was irresistibly fascinated; she couldn’t help studying them and wondering, with an inner chill as if her blood had turned to quicksilver, if she would ever be like that.
After they had driven up and down awhile, Tee Jay turned south and drove past the last of the cottages, clinging to the dunes precariously like driftwood on the swelling sea, past the last of the swimmers, the last lifeguard, dozing and golden on his stilted perch, to the open beach.
“Where are we going now?” Naomi asked.
“Swimming,” Tee Jay said.
“Well,” she said, “I’d like to go to the bathhouse and put on my bathing suit.”
“The bathhouse? Christ, what for?”
“Turn the car around, please,” she said.
“That’s the craziest thing I ever heard of,” Tee Jay said. “The bathhouse costs fifty cents apiece. We can dress in the dunes for free.”
“I’d prefer to dress in the bathhouse.”
“What’s the matter with you? Courtney won’t mind.”
“Can’t you see the girl is moved by natural modesty?” Courtney said. “Take her to the bathhouse.”
“Natural modesty, my ass! Fifty cents is a whole lot of money to fork over all of a sudden just because for the first time in her life Naomi decides she’s modest.”
“Women are that way,” Courtney said. “Full of little surprises.”
He only said that, Naomi knew, because of the way his own wife had done him. After three years of married life and two children, she simply left one day, drove off with Billy Towne, who was a salesman of fishing tackle up and down both coasts, from Fernandina to Coral Gables, from Pensacola to Key West. Yes, Billy Towne could take Maxine all over the whole state. She could go to the beaches while he was working, and at night they could go to all the bars and nightclubs. It was a good life for her. The thing was how hard it hit Courtney. He worshiped Maxine, like a fool, because anybody could have told him how she was born a bitch and would die a bitch, no matter how pretty she was. So away went Maxine, with the two little girls, living in open unashamed sin with that Billy Towne. And poof! Courtney was in the State Asylum. Oh yes, he would make all of those nasty cracks about women in general, but the world knew that if Maxine crooked her little finger at him, he’d go back to her on his hands and knees. Tee Jay, of course, had never married anybody. He hadn’t even mentioned marriage in all this time. Still, there was always the chance that he would someday.
“I’m sorry,” Naomi said, “but I really would rather dress at the bathhouse. I’ll pay for it myself.”
“In that case …” Tee Jay said.
And he turned the car around in a wild, wide, sand-scattering circle and sped back toward the main beach. He hunched over the wheel, close to the windshield like a racing driver, and put the gas pedal to the floor. That was Tee Jay for you!
Once inside the small unpainted cubicle in the bathhouse, standing on the wet, strutted slats, Naomi undressed and hung her clothes on a nail. She was a tall ungainly girl. Her face, though cast in large, coarse features, had a uniformity that made her seem conventionally pretty. But her body was oddly proportioned. Her thick, heavy-muscled legs, her hard high large buttocks, and her flat stomach seemed to belong to someone much larger, perhaps even, except for the curve of her hips, to a powerful man. (“My fullback,” Tee Jay called her.) Her upper body was slight and frail-boned, flat-chested like a young girl’s. In her clothes, wearing full skirts, loose blouses, and flat shoes, she achieved a kind of equilibrium, but at moments like this, alone and naked, she felt such a shame and self-revulsion that it nearly brought her to tears. She struggled into her black, one-piece suit, too tight at the hips, padded at the breasts, put on her white bathing cap, and placed the elastic-banded key around her wrist. She pulled the door of the cubicle to, sharply, behind her.
The two of them were waiting for her in the car. They turned their heads together and stared at her as she came across the boardwalk and down the wooden steps and across the powdery sand near the dunes. She began running toward them.
“Look,” Courtney cried, “a female centaur. Whatever that may be.”
“Let’s get the show on the road,” Tee Jay said.
Then, still staring at her as she got into the car, Courtney said, “Cough drops.”
When Tee Jay found a place that suited him, out of sight of the main beach, the two of them took their swimming trunks and went up into the dunes to change. Naomi spread out a beach blanket and covered her exposed skin with suntan oil. She had a little plaid beach bag from which she took a pair of dark glasses and a confession magazine. Just then, settling comfortably in the sunlight, she heard the thunder and felt the breeze coming stronger and cooler off the ocean, saw lightning far off in the clouds and whitecaps flickering across the whole expanse of the visible sea.
“It’s going to squall,” she called.
“So what?” Tee Jay replied from the dunes.
And she looked and saw the two of them, the twins, standing side by side on top of a dune, perfectly identical except that Courtney was pale and soft beside Tee Jay. They came charging down in a little whirlwind of sand and legs, leapt right over her and past with flashing heels and flanks, raced into the water. Soon they were splashing each other and shouting, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other. She went back to the car and got the box of Baby Ruths. She returned and, opening her magazine, began to read the sad thrilling tale of an innocent girl who was seduced by a state policeman.
By the time the two came back from their swim, they were arguing again, and about the same old thing. Tee Jay opened the glove compartment and produced a pint of whiskey. They both had a drink. A lot they cared about her approval! Then Tee Jay went around and opened the trunk. He fumbled around until he found a softball and two gloves. It was a brand-new softball, white, hard, and shiny.
“You want to play catch?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t feel much like it right now.”
“Well, how do you like that?”
“I’ll throw a few with you,” Courtney said.
They moved out in front of the car and began to lob the ball easily, back and forth. Tee Jay was the athlete. He played third base for Morrison’s Department Store Softball Team. Naomi loved to go and watch him play on a spring or summer evening under the lights, in his red and green and gold uniform. He was so quick, so deft, so dandy around the bag. He was the only man she had ever seen, except in newsreels and such, that she could really admire when he was playing a game. The others, even the good ones, were so sloppy and careless, like they didn’t care, like it was so easy for them, running and throwing and just being men, like they didn’t give two hoots what anybody thought. She hated them. Tee Jay was nervous and quick and delicate; every move he made seemed to have its reason. Naomi’s heart leapt for him when she saw him move swiftly to snag a hard-hit ball, or when he came running full speed, but like a dancer on points, to scoo
p up a bunt, whirl, and in the same motion burn it down to first base. Courtney, on the other hand, had never been much at sports. That was a funny thing. The first time he was at the State Asylum he got the notion somehow that he was going to play shortstop for the New York Yankees. It was terrible. Tee Jay would have to drive up there and spend whole weekends batting him flies and grounders and playing catch with him. At least, Naomi noticed, he had improved from all the practice. She returned to her magazine story.
The storm moved in on them. Drops of rain began to fall, and, looking up, Naomi saw that the black clouds were overhead and all around them. They seemed to be shaggy and running like buffaloes in the movies. The waves were much bigger now and broke on the sand with huge crashes and bursts of foam like breaking glass. She bundled her things together and ran to the car. She pulled the lever that controlled the mechanism, and the gray top began to creak forward into place.
“Who told you to do that?” Tee Jay yelled at her.
He ran over, his face pinched and flushed with anger, and let the top down again. The rain was falling harder now, in thick drops. The trouble was that they had started the argument again.
“Cut off your nose to spite your face,” she said. But a lance of lightning and a barrage of thunder drowned out her voice.
“What was that? What did you say?”
“Never mind,” she replied.
She crouched in the front seat and the cold rain fell on her. The two of them, heedless of rain, thunder, and lightning, stood there shouting at each other and throwing the ball as hard as they could. They had tossed their gloves aside. They shouted and threw the ball so hard she didn’t see how they could catch it bare-handed. It was very very dangerous for all of them, she knew. She’d heard so many stories about people being struck by lightning on the beach. Besides, the tide was rising; pretty soon they wouldn’t be able to drive back along the beach. She got out of the car and ran to Tee Jay.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
Tee Jay threw the ball to Courtney. He threw it gently.
“Let’s quit,” Tee Jay said. “This is crazy.”
“Are you afraid?” Courtney yelled.
The full strength of the squall was on them now. With the rain pelting, the high wind and the lightning and thunder, they had to scream at each other. Courtney fired the ball back to Tee Jay and he threw it back just as hard. Naomi could see the red round shape of the ball printed on Tee Jay’s palm and fingers.
“You catch it,” Courtney screamed at her. “You’re the coach.”
She caught it and threw it to Tee Jay. Then it was a three-cornered game. For a few minutes she was glad to be shielding Tee Jay, catching that wet, hot, skin-wincing ball and throwing it, easy, to him. But it hurt and Tee Jay seemed impatient to throw again. He didn’t seem to appreciate what she was doing at all. So she threw it to him as hard as she could.
“Damn you!” he said.
Her hands were bruised and aching, and she was afraid of the thunder and lightning, but still they kept throwing the ball so fast that she didn’t know what to do. Finally Courtney dropped one and it rolled away down the beach. He chased after it, and she was running behind him. When he seized it and spun around, wild-eyed, to throw it to her, she was close enough to kiss him if she had wanted to. Surprised, he started back. The tears started streaming from her eyes.
“Please, please, let’s stop now and go home.”
“No,” he said. “No, we aren’t going to stop.”
“Please,” she said. “Please!”
He squeezed the ball in both hands.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what. You take off your bathing suit, and we’ll go home.”
“Throw the god-damn ball!” Tee Jay yelled.
Courtney waved at him to wait a minute. Tee Jay stamped his feet angrily, but waited.
“Go on, take it off,” Courtney said to her.
“Will we go home then?”
He nodded.
She undid her shoulder straps and slipped and wriggled out of the rain-soaked suit. It lay like a small wrinkled shadow at her feet.
“Now dance.”
“What?”
“When I brought you the flower, you made a dumb joke about going to a dance. Well, this is it. Dance for me.”
Clumsily, cold, shivering in the wind, and still crying, she began to dance. Courtney laughed at her. He reached out and touched her small, brown, shrunken nipples with his fingers.
“See what I mean about cough drops?” he said. Then he cupped his hands and yelled into the wind to Tee Jay, “See what I mean? See what I mean about love? I love her!”
“Never mind all that crap,” Tee Jay replied. “Just keep throwing the god-damn ball and we’ll see who’s afraid around here.”
Naomi knelt down then, beside her bathing suit, and hid her face. She huddled on her self like a child asleep, and the two men continued to throw the ball back and forth with unrelenting fury.
THE GUN AND THE HAT
IT WAS SATURDAY AFTERNOON and so when the dusty pickup truck came too fast down the street, heedless of streetlights and stop signs, and shrieked to a trembling stop like a dog on a yanked leash in front of Estes Hardware Store, not even anywhere near the curb, there were plenty of people, loafers and loungers, shoppers and spenders, all kinds, to look up and wonder what in the world it could be that brought Red Leland to town in such a reckless fury. One thing you could say for Red, poor boy, he was nothing if not a careful man, an unhurried man. Hard times and bad luck can teach a man patience. The weather, the years, and more than his share of tribulation had worn him, tanned and seamed his face, pursed his lips so he always looked ready to spit or kiss, and all but swallowed up the rich baritone voice you could hear fully, clear and true as a fine bell, only on a Sunday morning, coming from up in the choir stall of the First Baptist Church.
He swung out of the cab, long-legged and grim, came around to the other side and literally dragged the fat boy from his seat, lifted him with one hand over a space of pure air with the boy’s feet dancing like a marionette’s. The door on that side of the truck remained open, awkward on its hinges, like a broken wing. Red had three grown daughters to worry over and a sickly wife, and only one son, the fat boy, enormous for his age really, so burdened with flesh you could hardly call him a boy at all; and he surely couldn’t be counted on to grow into a manhood that would ease Red’s hard years on the farm. They said it was something wrong with the glands, something that couldn’t be cured.
The tall man in neat and faded work clothes stepped over the curb and moved across the sidewalk, pulling the fat boy behind him, the boy crying silently, thick gleaming tears filling his squinty eyes and running down a face as sad and featureless as a moon by day, streaking his cheeks with long rivulets. On the sidewalk people gave way, stepped back to make a path for them. Somehow ashamed, they turned away and wouldn’t look. Inside the store they felt the silence as swiftly as if someone had switched off the sound of their voices with a flick of the thumb. They moved back away from the long counter and stared at the shelves along the wall. Red Leland stopped then and stood with the boy beside him, both of them limp and relaxed now, just standing there holding hands side by side at the counter waiting until Wayne Estes came to them and grinned.
“Something for you, Red?”
“I want a gun.”
That stiffened them all so suddenly they might have turned to stone on the spot. They knew, too, everyone around did, about Red’s thing. It came from the Bible. Years before, young and gangling then, clutching a cheap black Bible to him like a bouquet, he used to stop them on the street and pester them about it. “The Bible says Thou shalt not kill,” he said over and over again to anyone who wanted to or couldn’t help having to stand still long enough to listen to him. “Now it don’t say what thou shalt not kill. It just say you ain’t supposed to kill, period! And what that means is everything in God’s whole creation, everything living, gro
wing, breathing, every kind of creature under the sun.” He wouldn’t, not in those days, hunt or fish or even eat meat. But that was when he was a young man, still a boy, before he married and before he had to go to the War. Nowadays he didn’t talk about it anymore. He fished the lakes in the county because he had to, ate whatever he could get and afford just like everybody else does, when he could get it for himself and his family. But still to this day he wouldn’t hunt, though the truth is the hunting is good out around his farm. He wouldn’t allow anyone else to hunt his land either, and some said they had actually seen the small brown white-tailed deer come dainty-footed, printing their neat small hoofs in the soft dirt of his cleared field, to eat out of his hands. It was for sure he’d never allow a weapon of any kind in his house. Some said he wouldn’t kill a snake to save his own skin.
Wayne Estes’s immemorial, impersonal storekeeper’s smile flickered, but retained its essential constancy.
“What kind of a gun would you have in mind?”
“Any kind, so long as it works and don’t cost much. A cheap one.
“You want a rifle or a pistol? Or maybe a shotgun?”
Red Leland hunched forward, bowing his head to think about it, until his face nearly touched the smoky waxed finish of the counter. He shut his eyes and, freeing the boy’s hand, pressed his own huge hands into the wood. It wouldn’t have surprised a soul if, when he stood up tall again, the image of his two hands had remained fixed forever in the glossy wood, like prints left in soft cement. He straightened up and his arms fell loose and slack at his sides.
“A pistol will suit me just fine so long as it’s cheap.”
Evening Performance Page 12
