It was Vicki who sighted the shack. Even after she called it to his attention it was difficult to tell it from one of the dunes. It was a shapeless, shambled thing, collapsed at one end, with a growth of mesquite bunched all round.
Vicki held the little girl while he pried loose the weathered wooden slabs nailed across the entrance. He examined the dirt floor and then led his wife and child inside.
Afterwards, he built a fire beyond the entrance, testing the direction of the wind to avoid the smoke, building it with cactus leaves and cattle droppings at first, the way wornout pioneer brides had collected buffalo chips on this treeless plain fifty years before, and then with loose planking from the sides of the tumbled shack. When he had the fire roaring in his face, blistering his forehead and singeing the hair on his arms, he sagged against the door in exhaustion while Vicki’s cool hands moved over his cheek, her vacant voice rising and falling in allusions to wiener roasts and toasted marshmallows.
Soon the sounds of her words trailed off in his consciousness and he fell asleep. He lay alone for a period of time and then there was the warmth of Vicki’s body against him. In his sleep he knew it was Vicki and not Vicki; he was aware only of the warmth and the nearness and the smell of her perfume in the desert air. When he came awake suddenly they were together in the half-light of the fire, his face buried against her neck. He stood and began gathering more wood for the fire. Vicki was sitting awake when he returned.
“Please come home,” she said to him.
“What?”
“Please come back with Victoria Anne and me. I want you to live with us again. I know I’ve been bad. I know some of the things I’ve done are nearly unforgivable. But I think of you all the time and I need you all the time. Both of us need you. Do you think you need us?”
“I don’t know. Of course I need Anne. I guess I need you — or something of you — in a way. It’s just — I can’t believe it would be any different than before.”
“I think it would. I think I’m different than before.”
“You probably are. But if there’s any improvement I’m not sure it has any bearing on us.” He lay back in the sand and closed his eyes.
“Hold me like you were.” She was on her knees leaning over him.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You were. You were all over me for a while.”
“I was asleep.”
“What difference does that make? It just shows … something, I don’t know, but it was so nice to be with you again.”
She lay beside him. Jay lay on his back with his eyes closed trying to think of sleep, release, escape, of shaking loose and giving in, of headlong flight and boozy, luxuriant fulfillment. Where were all the gay places? Where were —
“I’m looking forward to the Governor’s party,” Vicki said. “Will you ride up with me?”
Where was all the fun and —
“Will you ride up with me?”
It was out there somewhere, remote and unattainable. It was out here in these landscapes. It was at the Governor’s party it was —
“We can leave day after tomorrow, Jay.”
“Try to sleep,” he finally said. “Lie next to me if you want, the way you were, and try to sleep.”
He could lie next to her here and ride up with her on the day after tomorrow and they could fly home together when the ranch party was ended and — It was all a madness. The whole crazy idea would turn to vinegar once it was daylight. There would be Sarah standing in the sun, the white down on her arms, her skin all glowing …
He liked to think he had been pushed toward Sarah from the beginning, but it was just not true. There had been too much pestilence in his head at the beginning. What stale enthusiasms remained were directed toward his work with Arthur Fenstemaker, and it was some time afterwards that Sarah had begun to poke around in his dead remains.
He had thought, frankly, it would be hopeless, but the capacity for love had not vanished entirely. He loved Sarah; surely he must love her; he had not gone out of the business after all; and it had all been going so perfectly until the evening the week before when they had been together at the apartment. In the dark heat of the room she had just begun to perspire, faintly beneath the softness of hair that shaped her face, lightly through the blouse and along the folds where her exquisite breasts began. They were a little heap in the middle of the bed, and she whispered in his ear I want to yes I think I want to, and from where he was lying he could see the blistered paint on the door facings and the preposterous bathtub with the elaborately gnarled legs. The draperies rustled quietly as she brushed past, folding her clothes carefully over the back of a chair; there were dust motes suspended in the stalks of light coming through the blinds and the fuzz from the bedspread tickled his neck. She had come toward him, her olive skin glistening, pausing and regarding herself with astonishment in the rippled mirror; her back and shoulders made lovely lines in the soft light, and as he moved toward where she was sitting on the side of the bed he could see that she was trembling slightly. It was not until he had kissed the back of her neck that he realized she had the magazine laid out in her lap, open to the picture sequence of Vicki in the haystack, and by then she had begun to sob convulsively.
Afterwards, he could not fix it in his mind just how long they stayed there. Thinking back there was only the shapeless space in his memory: only the two of them in the dark room, in the rumpled bedclothes, with Sarah crying quietly to herself. Sometime during the night he had driven her home, and since then they had not talked about it. They had been together nearly all the waking hours, but it had been impossible to discuss: there had been only the private, hopeless insistence to themselves that it never really happened.
Where was she now? The shifting desert wind reminded him that he had left her with Greg Calhoun, pursuing the phantom rabbits across the sand. Was she back now and had she set out with the others at the camp in search of him? And how was he ever to articulate his feeling for her once she had found him? He felt sleep coming on again, and now in exhaustion he turned toward Vicki, regret and resistance gone out of him, submerging himself in her enormous warmth, remembering nothing in his dreams but the great, swelling, unaccountable pleasure of her presence. His next conscious moment was when he opened his eyes in the daylight and saw Hoot Gibson grinning at him fiercely from the doorway of the shack.
Ten
“IT WAS ONE OF those evenings,” Edmund Shavers was saying, “one of those magnificent summer evenings, flaming with color, suffused with all the magnificence and simplicity of the love we feel when we’re young. Everything was rose, then pink and cream and then rose again, and the air — my God! the air. Well you could taste it. There was a texture to it, and you could taste the sweetness, and the sun was dropping down behind an old stone farm building; its roof looked as if it was on fire; and there was a rusting Nehi sign across one of the windows and there were a couple of kids playing in the grass out front. It was about this time of evening — right now — and I thought you couldn’t write it or paint it or photograph it; not and convey all the movement and emotion. So I knew then I wanted to direct pictures.”
“How very poetic, Mr. Shavers,” the Governor’s wife said.
“Well it’s a little hard to describe, but it’s what I felt at the time.”
“I believe it, Ed, by God I believe it.” Greg Calhoun said.
“Well why shouldn’t you believe it? It’s what I felt. Why should I be trying to —”
“That wasn’t why I tried to get into pictures,” Vicki said. She was a little tight, and although her face retained all its color and expression, the languor had gone out of her voice and she had become sullen. The others shifted in their aluminum folding chairs and watched the sunset.
“I was just tired of living in one-room apartments and not having enough money to go out and that awful window fan drumming away next to my head night after night. It was that window fan. You remember that window fan, Jay-Jay?”
“Yes,” Jay said.
They sat quietly for a time, attempting to recapture or sustain the feelings Shavers had evoked in them. Jay watched the sunset and tried not to think about the window fan, but he could hear it again, drumming away next to their bed; it kept coming back to him. The night he left Evelyn Krueger crying to herself in the front room he had returned home to find Vicki already groggy with sleep. She rolled toward him in the bed, grabbing him round the middle and kissing his back. “Where’ve you been?” she said. “We had something to eat,” he said. “Evelyn and I had something to eat … Where did you disappear to?” “Went furrh ride,” she said. “Jus’ went furrh ride.” And she was asleep again, almost immediately, with the window fan going next to the bed, the sound of it set in his memory that night during the hours he lay awake, listening to the rhythm of the fan and Vicki’s even breathing.
In California the evenings were cool; he could still hear the fan; they had a three-room apartment then, with a nursery for the little girl, pink walls and pink asphalt tile on the floor and the Mother Goose figures he had strung on a mobile; the fan still drumming in his ears even when there was no fan and Vicki out past midnight all the time, coming in half drunk and giddy with delight over the parties her agent had given her. He heard it in Japan, in the officers’ quarters, the window fan grinding away in his brain. There was that phone call from the States, his old commander being very frank about it … It’s not just that she’s going out with some of the men on the base, Jay, but she’s borrowing money from them. It was something about clothes, party dresses, and something else about a photographer’s bill, and there just wasn’t enough in the allotment to cover it all. There was the window fan roaring in his ears after he had got back and then moved out and then moved on; where was that town? Where he had worked at a radio station, selling commercial time to car dealers and appliance store operators and substituting occasionally for the wheezing, bucolic disk jockey; it was quiet there, on the street where he lived in the rooming house, elm and oak trees along each side and dusty-leaved petunias lining the walks and the wisteria and queen’s wreath winding in and out the latticework on the porch.
It was quiet there, except for the —
“Let’s take a walk, Sarah, while there’s still some light.”
Greg Calhoun was bending over her, his hands gripping the armrests of the folding chair, his face a few inches away.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The Governor may need me. I —”
“He’s on the phone again,” Mrs. Fenstemaker said. “Go ahead, you two. If he needs anything I can take care of him.”
“He’s going into town with me shortly,” Shavers said. “We’re going to take a look at the rushes. We can all go in and see how his shots turned out.”
“We’ll be right back,” Sarah said. She stood and moved off with Greg Calhoun.
Arthur Fenstemaker struck a match with his thumbnail and lit a cigarette. He frowned into the mouthpiece of the phone.
“They’re going to what?”
“March on the Capitol. That’s the word here. They’re comin’ from all over, expect to get at least a thousand, maybe fi’teen hundred.”
“Now wait a minute — what the goddam hell are they marching for?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not certain to happen, of course. But there are a lot of rumors, a lot of talk. It all started down there when that guy made his speech.”
“What rumors?”
“There’s just some talk. It’s all very vague. That there’s going to be some kind of action taken in Washington. It all started down there when that guy made his little speech. Now they’re all comin’ back, demanding you call a special session.”
“Special session for what? Hell and damn, what can they —”
“Legislation to get around whatever action is taken.”
“How are they so sure there’s going to be some action.”
“Nobody’s sure. There’s just a lot of talk.”
“No danger of a demonstration if there’s no action, is there?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“All right. Now … Just try to sit on this thing if you can. God Almighty will have us by the hand if we get out of it. I don’t know what’s happening. But the blind man knows the Lord, and we may just … Take it easy. I’ll call you.”
In the stillness of the evening, with the soft light beginning to fade, Arthur Fenstemaker stood outside the trailer house for a moment before approaching the others. When he got close, they turned in their chairs and greeted him.
“Let’s have a drink. I’m hungry for one,” he said. “I get these terrible pains in my chest and back and there’s too much on my mind, and it takes either a pill or some good Scotch whiskey to get me unwound. I prefer the whiskey.”
“Would you like me to get out the Vibrator, dear?”
“Later. I want to sit here and have a drink.”
“There are the rushes,” Shavers said. “You want to take a look at them, don’t you?”
“Yes. I don’t feel like it, but I’m fascinated about this stuff and of course that’s why we agreed to stay another night … Wouldn’t mind spending the goddam summer.”
“You don’t want to go back, dear? Why don’t you want to go back?”
“Just hate to face all that madness.”
“Trouble at home?” Jay said. “What did you —”
“No. Nothing serious. Let’s have that drink, Jay. Where’s Sarah? Where’d Sarah go? She knows how I like ’em.”
“Sarah took a walk,” Mrs. Fenstemaker said. “I’ll fix you one.”
The lights of the limousine flashed in their eyes for an instant before moving around to the back of them. Hoot Gibson and Vicki emerged. They left the car doors open; the music was turned up full volume on the phonograph.
“We went riding,” Vicki said. “We got as far as the highway and I discovered the record machine. We decided to come back and dance … Will you dance with me, Governor?” She had her head thrown back and was moving to the music, her bare feet sliding softly in the sand, her hips shifting in rhythm, circling round the others.
“In a minute, Miss Vicki, in a minute. I’m going to have a little drink first. Then we’ll dance the rest of the goddam night.”
Vicki danced with Hoot Gibson, who swung her over the sand. He had his shoes off and his pants legs rolled up and was very light on his feet. “Smooooth,” Vicki hummed.
There was a silence while another record fell on the turntable.
“Allright, Jay,” Vicki said. She had planted herself in front of him, her legs apart, her hands on her hips. “S’ure duty dass with your wife. Dass with me, Jay.”
He stood and danced with her. They moved through several numbers, the others sitting quietly, looking up at them occasionally. Hoot Gibson stood around in his bare feet, sorting through records, waiting his turn. Vicki had both arms around Jay, and they danced close together.
“What are you trying to do?” he finally said to her.
“You like that? Hoot Gibson did.”
“I’ll bet he did.”
“Wait till I get hold th’ Governor.”
Sarah and Greg Calhoun returned at that moment; Jay stood away from Vicki and then led her back to Hoot Gibson. He moved to Sarah’s side, but she did not speak. There had been the agonizing silences since the morning, from the time he had greeted Hoot Gibson at the entrance to the shack, waking Vicki and carrying the little girl out to the waiting limousine where Sarah and Greg Calhoun were waiting.
No one had missed them until well after sunup, when those at the camp were awakened for the shooting of the Governor’s scene. They had even sent Mexicans on horseback out looking for them then. Sarah sat quietly in back, holding the little girl in her arms, while Vicki described the long walk the night before and asked about the reaction at the camp when the three of them had not returned.
Sarah had sat quietly, holding the girl, and there had been nothing he could really say t
o her since the morning. It was impossible to explain or to make righteous assertions of his innocence. Had it all been an innocence? There was something that Sarah sensed between Vicki and himself — some vague, voluptuous aura that she could not identify. It was as in a dream, or waking from a dream, and being haunted by the unreality that lingered afterwards between the dreamer and those dreamt about. It had taken him most of the day to rebuild any aggression toward Vicki. At first he had felt only softness and acceptance. They had lain in each other’s arms half the night: Now it all seemed a monstrous infidelity which both possessed and repelled him. The whole memory of it was an awful poetry compounded of innocence and blasphemy. How was he to explain this to Sarah or even to himself?
Now he sat next to Sarah in the sand, watching Vicki dance with Hoot Gibson and Greg Calhoun. He kissed the exquisite curve of her arm. “We need to talk,” he said.
“The Governor wants us to go into town with him soon,” she said.
“Let’s take a walk.”
“I’m tired of walking. I just got back from walking. I nearly walked myself to death last night … Seems you should’ve had enough too. If all you did was walk.”
“Isn’t there any place we can go?”
“Well, there’s that shack. I wonder if you could find that shack again. I wonder —”
“All right, forget about it.” He stood and moved to one of the wooden picnic tables where the bar had been set up. He returned with drinks for the two of them.
“Are you uncomfortable here,” she said to him, “with Vicki caterwauling around? Is that it? Is that —”
“I said forget it. I’m sorry I even —”
Gay Place Page 48
