Eveningland

by Michael Knight

  Homer Tenpenny patted him on the back.

  “Time to settle up,” he said.

  The next day, it began to rain and did not stop for a full week, a misty, spitting rain interspersed with downpour that rendered the Gulf invisible from Marcus’s balcony. His view reached no farther than the end of the old pier. He swam his slow Australian crawl in the indoor pool and wondered what to do with the Admiral’s Quarters. The complex would be a blemish once the island was restored but if he tore it down, where would he live? In the sauna, sweat running in his chest hair, he entertained fantasies of living in a teepee or digging some sort of bunker, but he recognized these idylls for what they were and blamed them on the heat. At dinnertime, he popped his umbrella and hustled over to Dauphin Bar and Grill. The rain had chased the crowds away but Norma Bird was nursing a beer two stools down from one of the holdouts, a ship’s captain who owned a saltbox with crooked shutters on the Sound. Peebles something? Something Peebles? Marcus recognized the locals by their property but had trouble recalling their names. This man was close to Marcus’s age but had no wife, no children, no reason to stay except inertia and lack of imagination.

  “I’ve been here a long time,” he said.

  “But it won’t be here,” Marcus replied, “once every­body else is gone.”

  Peebles something shrugged and thanked Marcus for the beer and Marcus proceeded to drink himself into such a stupor that Norma Bird insisted on walking him home. Their hips bumped under his umbrella, her arm around his waist, rain beating on the pavement all around them. Halfway across the street, she stopped and turned to face him. She palmed his cheek. “You’d never know it to look at you,” she said, and though he didn’t understand exactly what she meant, he understood that a great deal more was implied. Her very nearness startled him, sobered him. His breath misted her glasses. For a long few seconds, Marcus covered her hand with his own. Then he left her standing under his umbrella in the rain.

  He was on his way back from Norma Bird’s office one afternoon when he noticed Emily’s Land Rover, the car he’d bought as a high school graduation present, idling in front of the Admiral’s Quarters.

  Emily spotted him on his bike.

  “Daddy, is that you? I see you. Daddy, you get over here right now.”

  He rolled up beside her car, ringing the bell on his handlebars in greeting.

  “You’re in big trouble,” Emily said.

  Despite the angry words, she let him kiss her cheek. Meredith was in the backseat with infant James.

  “You’d better let us in,” she said. “I need somewhere to nurse the baby.”

  Marcus thumbed the code on the keypad and pedaled through the security gate into the parking garage, Emily’s Land Rover at his heels. Once inside the condo, Meredith fished a newspaper clipping from her purse. The headline: Mysterious Land Grab by Local Real Estate Tycoon. The article included a photograph of Marcus. He remembered when it was taken. Maybe ten, twelve years ago. Before Suzette’s diagnosis. Their house had been featured in a lifestyle magazine. In the photograph, he looked awkward but game. The newspaper had cropped Suzette out of the shot.

  “What on earth?” Emily said.

  “I’m sorry you had to hear this way. I really am.”

  “You’re a mess, Daddy,” Meredith said. “That’s why we came.”

  Infant James was at her breast. Marcus had never felt comfortable in the presence of a woman nursing a baby, especially not his daughter. He directed his gaze out the sliding glass doors to the balcony, an evasion that made him look guilty, though that was not the way he felt.

  For an hour, Marcus listened while his daughters pleaded their case, first Meredith, then Emily, sometimes both at once, their voices twining in his ears, his eyes focused on the breakers rolling ceaselessly up onto the beach. Theirs was not, he understood, an unreasonable position. They addressed him as respectfully as he could have hoped, given the circumstances. He refused to believe that he could lose them over this. Finally, Meredith tucked her breast back into her blouse and Emily concluded their remarks. “This is not what Mother would have wanted.”

  Marcus hesitated. Such sensible girls.

  “I was thinking I would have your mother reinterred. There’s a beautiful little cemetery on the Sound.”

  Emily burst into tears. She covered her face with both hands and made a noise like a squeaky wheel. Meredith stared at her father, perplexed, infant James already sleeping in the crook of her arm.

  “There’s plenty of money,” Marcus said. “You don’t have to worry.”

  Emily dropped her hands into her lap. At the same time, she raised her heels and stomped them down, a gesture that called to mind the outbursts of her adolescence. “Oh, Daddy, how could you be so dumb?”

  “Once everything is settled on the island, you’ll be welcome to visit. We’ll have it all to ourselves.”

  Meredith put a hand on Emily’s shoulder. “We should go. We’re sorry to bother you, Daddy.” She stood slowly, her eyes never leaving his, as if in the presence of a skittish horse. Pregnancy had filled his oldest daughter out—her hips, her calves. She looked complete to Marcus, grown at last.

  “Could I hold the baby?” he said. “Just for a second before you leave.”

  Meredith balked at offering her child up to her father but she relented. Marcus bounced his sleeping grandson in his arms, breathed him in, the smell of him sweet and plain. Sunlight sifted across his face. Infant James twitched and scrunched his cheeks. His cheeks were smooth and pale, round as Christmas baubles. Marcus wondered, not for the first time, what infants dreamed.

  Then came the lawyers and the injunctions and all pending transactions put on hold until matters could be settled by the court. His daughters wanted Marcus declared non compos mentis. The documents arrived by UPS. Marcus read the pages carefully, tapped the edges together, and filed them in a kitchen drawer with Emily’s letter and his car keys.

  He biked down to Fort Gaines, locals waving as he passed, honking their horns. He parked his Schwinn in the shadow of the fort and gazed out across Mobile Bay in the direction of his old house. Even now, perhaps, a buyer was wandering the quiet rooms, footsteps echoing on the hardwood. That house had been designed by the architect Fritz Belmont, Jr., a beautiful setting for what had been a beautiful life by any standard, a place so big and rambling that sometimes Marcus could hear his daughters calling and not know where to find them. Picture him sitting there with Suzette, exchanging a smile, a touch, light streaming in through the windows, Marcus rising from the couch or the kitchen table and following the sound of their voices along the hall or up the stairs, pushing open doors, peeking around corners, knowing, as he moved toward them, that anything they desired, be it comfort or praise or some silly, pretty thing, anything in the world was his to give.

  Back at the condo, still smarting with reminiscence, he spotted a trio of fishermen set up on the beach in front of the old pier, rod handles jammed into the sand. Used to be you could fish from the rail. Marcus had seen the photographs on the wall at Dauphin Bar and Grill. In one of these, the young Tenpenny brothers are posed with a five-foot bull shark, a crowd of gawkers behind them, the bull shark sprawled damply across the planks. Marcus had heard them tell the story, how they’d taken turns on the reel. Even at high tide, they would have had to haul the shark ten feet through nothing but air to wrangle it onto the pier. A miracle the line didn’t break. Marcus imagined the shark hovering up and up and up, Tenpennys and gawkers cheering it on. Now these fishermen whipped their lines out past the surf, the pier looming at their backs. They waited and Marcus, on his balcony, waited with them. He felt like he was watching for a sign. He willed a fish to strike but nothing was biting. Marcus went back inside to fix a drink. To their credit, he thought, his daughters had managed to hold off for this long, to give him this much rope. In the morning, he got his legal team on the phone.

&nb
sp; The hearing took place in Mobile, the county seat. Marcus’s lawyers wore the finer suits—sleek grays, deepwater blues. They battered the opposition’s expert witnesses, Meredith and Emily watching from the plaintiff’s table with tissues crumpled in their fists. Marcus did not love them any less. If anything, he loved them more, loved their certainty and their grave faces, each manifesting a different aspect of their mother—Emily her upturned nose, Meredith her ears, perfectly shaped, like the ears from a drawing in a textbook. Both of them had Suzette’s pragmatic eyes. And he felt, quite suddenly, during a particularly contentious back and forth regarding the house on Mobile Bay, the rush and tug of some tremendous force dragging at him like an undertow. He could not be sure if this sensation was born of the hearing itself or the presence of his wife in the features of his daughters or the realization that the bounty of this life is not greater than its disappointments, but he clutched the arms of his chair as if to keep from going down. The courtroom was windowless, drop-ceilinged, lit by rows of fluorescent bulbs. Beneath the table, anxious litigants had worn the carpet to its backing. The stenographer was missing a button on her blouse. But look—despite every­thing, his daughters shimmered. They understood nothing. They were trying to save him from himself. They might never forgive him if they failed.

  During the lunch recess, Marcus instructed his lawyers to surrender. But he was winning, they assured him. Precedent was clearly on his side. Buying Dauphin Island was definitely eccentric and arguably irresponsible but in no way unlawful or provably deranged. Marcus waved away their protests. “Whatever they want,” he said. A few hours later, with visible regret, the judge read the settlement into the record. Control of Marcus’s assets was granted to his daughters, his acquisitions on Dauphin Island rendered null and void.

  In the ensuing weeks, Meredith and Emily secured a spot for Marcus at a retirement community for active seniors. He would have his own private cottage, a view of Mobile Bay, access to the therapy he needed. There were grief counselors on staff. Support groups. Amazing how many residents had, in so many different ways, lost someone they loved.

  Marcus went along with their plans with quiet dignity. He was younger than his new neighbors but not by much. He played bingo, attended movie night. He took lessons in conversational Spanish and watercolor painting and ballroom dancing. He was popular among the widows, all the more so for his lack of interest. He was not a prisoner. He had his car but Marcus stayed close to the grounds, riding his bike on miles of paths, looping through his memory beneath the pines.

  The azaleas bloomed in April. Meredith visited every Tuesday and every Thursday and Marcus was careful to look presentable for her. He had been so busy for so long buying up other people’s property, other people’s lives, that he took an unexpected comfort in remaking himself to suit his daughters.

  Infant James was crawling now.

  “He looks like you,” Meredith said. “He has your chin.”

  “He looks like his grandmother,” Marcus said.

  In May, Meredith and her husband picked Marcus up and they made the pilgrimage to Tusca­loosa for Emily’s graduation. Because she’d asked for so many incompletes, the actual diploma would be blank but the university had agreed to let her process with the rest of her class. Marcus took pictures like a proper father and posed for more pictures with his children. He held his grandson in his lap. The sky was clear. The clouds were white. The air reeked of old bricks and cut grass and nostalgia.

  Everything as it should be.

  Occasionally that summer a family from Birmingham or Atlanta would rent a house on the west end of Dauphin Island or a condo at the Admiral’s Quarters. For a day or two, they would be charmed by the rustic quality of the place, the sense that nothing ever changed, but the children would grow bored and that rustic quality would begin to look more down-at-heel. They almost always left feeling sad but relieved, as if headed home from a wake. Fort Gaines was placed on a list of America’s Most Endangered Historic Places. Apparently, its walls were sturdy enough to withstand the blasts from Yankee cannons but not budgetary shortfalls and salt air. Alton Tenpenny suffered a fatal heart attack in August. Ike filed for bankruptcy and moved in with his son, a high school baseball coach in Selma. Homer carried on alone. Of all the residents of Dauphin Island, Norma Bird was the most sorry to bid farewell to Marcus Weems, the most disappointed that his vision was never realized. Yes, those commissions would have made her rich but she’d also been inspired by his belief that the island could be restored. Those hot blue days, she played solitaire on her computer, the office so quiet she kept imagining the jaunty ring of a bicycle bell outside. Then, in September, that in-between month, no longer summer, not yet fall, Hurricane Raphael blew in, smashing houses and ripping trees up by the roots and dragging countless tons of sand back out to sea.

  landfall

  Muriel decided to fill the bathtubs just in case. She got the water running in the master bath first, then crossed the landing to the tub her sons, Angus and Percy, had shared when they were boys. Her daughter, Doodle, had had her own bathroom. The privilege of privacy for Muriel’s only girl. Her oldest, Doodle, and her youngest, Angus, were married, had children of their own, lived right next door, in fact, on plots of land she’d deeded them as wedding presents. Her middle child, Percy, was without romantic prospects as far as she knew, without prospects of any kind that she could tell, was still doing whatever he’d been doing these past few months at Horseshoe Bend. She’d had a lot drawn up for him as well and would be pleased to hand it over the minute he decided that this was the life he wanted for himself.

  When all the taps were running and all the drains were plugged, Muriel circled back to where she’d started and began to shut off the taps again. She didn’t really think she’d need so much water but this hurricane was coming and it was important to keep busy. Idleness in an empty house made way for sadness. After the bathtubs, she would invent another task to occupy her time and then her daughter and her granddaughters would arrive and eventually, the storm would make its entrance and another day would be done. It was always with her now, that sadness, like one of those rare orchids you saw clinging to jungle branches on TV, always blooming in her at unexpected moments, and even on the move, scuffing down the hall toward Doodle’s room, the thought of evading it called it into being. Sadness. The word itself didn’t do the feeling justice. What she felt was a more complicated alchemy of emotion, equal parts grief and loneliness and longing, with measures of resentment and self-pity drizzled in. She had to lean against the wall a minute. Breathe. Her best defense against the feeling was to let herself fret over her children, to become more mother than wife. Than widow. So she worried about the fact that somehow Doodle had never learned to look after herself and that Angus would never live up to his father and that Percy would never, no matter how long she waited, no matter how many prayers she offered up, choose the life she wanted for him, the only life that would make him happy, whether he realized it or not. Exactly the sort of concerns she generally struggled to keep at bay but the only ones substantial enough to beat back the loss of her husband. And after a while the feeling passed, a dark flower closing its petals and tucking itself away.

  When the grandfather clock chimed at the bottom of the stairs, Muriel remembered that the taps were still running in her daughter’s room. How long had she been standing there? She balled her fists and bit her tongue. She pictured water brimming over the tub, pooling on the tile. She hated acting like a sad old woman. But she was being dramatic. The storm was still a long way off and it would be simple enough to clean the mess and the cleaning would provide one more task to fill her time. That’s what she was thinking as she rounded into Doodle’s bathroom and the sole of her sandal skidded like a skipped rock across the skin of water on the floor. Her body hung suspended for a moment, neither rising nor falling, as if whatever would happen next remained in doubt, before gravity took note of her and dragged her down.
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  The office still smelled like his father despite the fact that the old furniture had been carted out and replaced months ago, the carpet pulled, the blinds removed, windows left bare to let more light into the room. Angus worried sometimes that his imagination was playing tricks but he could have sworn he detected his father’s presence even now. Cigarettes and aftershave. The smell itself didn’t really bother him. There was a peppery mustiness to it that reminded him of the woods. What bothered Angus was feeling like his father was always looking over his shoulder.

  He dialed his wife’s cell and stood at the bank of windows behind the desk gazing out over the shipyard while he listened to the ringing. Here morning light glinted on the cyclone fence. Here on the tin roof of a warehouse. There it made darting shadows of passing birds. Across the dusty yard, berthed on the moss-green river, loomed the Kagero, built for a commercial fishing outfit in Yokohama, big enough and solid enough that she looked undisturbed by the imminence of weather. Men hustled around on deck, the only sign of life except for Angus. They had other boats on hand, half-complete or in dry dock for repairs, but there was nothing to be done about them now. The Kagero wasn’t finished, not quite, but she was seaworthy, which gave him options, and there was a better than average chance that she’d suffer more damage in port than on the open water. Hurricane Raphael had seemed so hesitant as it blew into the Gulf, drifting toward Mexico for half a day before veering up toward Louisiana like it couldn’t make up its mind. All the weather service tracking models had turned out wrong. At present, it looked like the eye of the storm would pass directly over Mobile Bay but most of the forecasters had settled on what amounted to a shrug.

  Voice mail. Nora always left her ringer off since the baby. Better this way, he thought. It wouldn’t be right to tell Nora over the phone.

  When Angus was thirteen years old, his father had put him to work at the shipyard after school. Family tradition. Learn the company from the bottom up. He’d started in the warehouse, doing inventory, cleaning, and maintaining equipment. Nothing dangerous, as insisted on by his mother. Mostly what he remembered was miles and miles of burning line, green and orange hoses that carried oxygen and acetylene to the welding torches. It was his job to sink each hose in a tub of water and run air through it. If it made bubbles, there was a leak, which he’d repair with rubber tape. Though the task was monotonous, Angus recognized the mortal responsibility of his assignment. If he allowed a damaged hose back into the yard, if a spark from one of the torches came into contact with a leak, the world could become suddenly, irrevocably aflame. He’d moved out of the warehouse when he was old enough to drive himself to work. Welding, shipfitting. Percy had already done his time at the yard and headed off to college and was on his way toward leaving this life behind. But Angus had known somehow, even young, even as a thirteen-year-old with his arms sunk elbow-deep in a tub of water, that this was the path his life would take, and that knowledge felt less like pressure than fate. There was a kind of comfort in its inescapabilty. He would never have to choose. His responsibilities had become more complex, of course, especially since his father’s death, but no more grave to Angus than burning lines and rubber tape.