Eveningland
Page 12
His phone buzzed in his pocket. Doodle. He was in no state of mind to deal with his sister. From this high up on the Kagero, he could look out over the warehouses and the dry docks and the slipways, all of it conjured into being by his father, all of it soon to be covered up with flood. A few steps shy of the wheelhouse, Angus heard a familiar voice and he hesitated at the open door, listened.
“So this fucking beaner, Regas, he wants to know can I come over to his place, says he’s having trouble with the casero. He’s gonna get evicted, right, and he can’t work if he’s got no place to live. I tell him I’m not his friend, I’m his jefe. But he’s got his hat in his hands. I mean literally. He has no idea what he should do. So I say all right. I’ll help him sort it out. But when I go over there, it’s not an apartment, it’s a fucking motel and they got fifteen people in the room. Sleeping in the tub at night and all over the floor and three or four to a bed. They’re not even trying to hide it. There’s this long row of shoes outside the door, work boots and sneakers and little old lady deals. It’s no fucking wonder the manager wanted those people gone.”
Angus stepped inside. Morris Peebles was perched in the captain’s chair, a lit cigarette between his lips, his old face all wrinkles and weather damage, his eyebrows lifting at Angus’s arrival, furrows of skin inching up and over his bald scalp like ripples in a pool.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
He’d been holding forth to a second man, at least four decades his junior, who pinched the brim of his cap between thumb and forefinger, lifted it from his head and used the other three fingers to scratch the pale line of his part. Angus lowered himself onto a bench, tried to look like he was settling in.
“You thought I’d let you leave without me?”
Morris said, “Well.”
Angus could feel the engine rumbling up through the hull into his spine. He felt it in his teeth, his hands. Bullard—that was the younger man’s name. Morris’s first mate.
“Dad would have wanted me here,” Angus said.
“Your father,” Bullard said, and then he bugged his eyes at Angus, his cap poised now over his chest. He didn’t seem to know how to finish the thought. Almost a year since Angus’s father died and still people went all solemn when he was mentioned. Finally, Bullard said, “I only met him a time or two but I was sorry as hell for you and your family.”
“Now let’s not get sentimental.” Morris winked at Angus. “A.B. Ransom was an asshole just like his son. Exactly the sort of asshole who’d send us out into the middle of a fucking hurricane.”
“There’s no smoking in here, Morris,” Angus said.
Morris laughed and stepped outside to flick the cigarette overboard and then somebody fuzzed in on the radio when he came back and suddenly everything was happening at once—lines cast off, the Kagero shuddering away from dock. Dozens of seagulls hovered over the bow. Angus pictured Nora and Murphy on the couch, the boy, his son, pulling loose of Nora’s breast long enough to offer her his first true smile and he felt a weakening in his limbs. But it was too late for second thoughts. Up ahead, the river opened into Mobile Bay, the bank lined with marsh grass, coins of light reflected on the water. The light existed in shimmering patches until the Kagero got too close and then it vanished for an instant and reappeared an instant later, farther out in front, jittery and frail, less like something leading them than like a thing in flight.
Percy Ransom had always believed that he would outgrow masturbation, that a day would come when he was beyond the reach of fantasy and desire, but here he was, thirty-eight years old, eyes shut tight, sweat filming on his brow, holding in mind a vision of his younger brother’s wife. Not two weeks before, he’d gone home for his nephew’s christening and caught a glimpse of Nora through a half-open door at the reception, her breast as she brought the baby to it, white skin, modest nipple, head tilted in such a way as to drape her hair along one cheek.
He pictured that hair, the exact same shade of brown as Nora’s eyes, shifting between her shoulder blades, imagined the sounds that she would make. Despite the fact that he lived alone but for his dog, he had, as always, locked himself in the bathroom. His dog, Mutt, was a shepherd mix he’d picked up in Montana and Percy didn’t like the way Mutt looked at him when he was jerking off.
He was panting hard, talking to himself, closing fast on climax when he heard someone calling his name. His eyes popped open. He considered ignoring the voice, but out here, this far from nowhere, there was only one person it could be and odds were Lester Hope knew he was home. Besides, if it was anyone other than Lester, Mutt would have barked.
“Hang on,” Percy said.
He stowed his erection, took a minute to collect himself, then flushed to put Lester off the scent.
Horseshoe Bend had been his father’s hunting camp, was Percy’s now or would be when the paperwork was finished. He’d cut a deal with Angus to swap his interest in the shipyard for sole ownership of Horseshoe Bend. It was more complicated than that. Angus had brought the lawyers in, but Percy didn’t care. He loved this place. The quiet. The river. The lean and looming pines.
They had almost a thousand acres up here, timbered enough to cover taxes and maintenance but not enough to affect the habitat, so the camp paid for itself while remaining more or less unchanged. The place was named for its position at a tapering curve in the Tombigbee River. One advantage of this location was that in winter the Tombigbee flooded the swamps at the neck of the horseshoe, driving deer and wild pigs onto the Ransoms’ property and trapping them for the season. So many the woods couldn’t feed them. You had to thin the population or they’d starve. Percy had visions of packing a deep freeze with venison and pork, living entirely off the land.
Already he’d planted a garden—tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, beans. If he wasn’t working in the garden, he spent his days spin-casting for largemouth, his evenings hiking logging trails to keep himself in shape, his nights studying up on canning vegetables or salting meat. He wanted nothing to pass his lips that he didn’t have a hand in bringing to the table.
The lodge was built around a sort of great hall: vaulted ceilings buttressed by rough-cut beams, big stone hearth, plank floors worn to a high shine by sock-footed men, trophy bucks gazing glumly down from the walls. A pair of bunk rooms spoked off from there, one for the father, one for the sons, and there was a simple kitchen at the back of the house, and behind the kitchen a screened-in sleeping porch overlooking the river. He found Lester in the great hall, waiting in an old cane-bottom rocking chair, scratching Mutt just above his tail, which made the dog shiver and dance.
“Sister called,” he said.
No cell reception at Horseshoe Bend and Percy’s father had forbidden a landline, so if anybody needed to get in touch they called Lester, who delivered the message.
“Yeah?” Percy was surprised. He hadn’t spoken with Doodle since the christening and even that was strained, half-hearted. Before that, the funeral. In between, silence. She disapproved, he understood, of his decision to cut his last ties to the shipyard. “What’d she want?”
“She say your momma took a fall.”
He fished in his breast pocket, removed a scrap of paper. Doodle’s number scribbled on the back of a hardware store receipt.
Percy said, “Is she hurt?”
Lester didn’t answer right away. He’d been the caretaker at Horseshoe Bend for as long as Percy could remember, lived in a mobile home on the property with a Vietnamese woman he’d brought back like a souvenir from that war. Percy had always felt vaguely ridiculous in Lester’s presence. At the moment, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Lester knew what he’d been up to in the john.
Lester held Mutt’s face in both hands, delivered his reply to the dog.
“You best come up to the house,” he said.
It took a minute, standing in the exact middle of the waiting room and clutching her purse with both ha
nds, for Doodle to realize that she was not alone. A uniformed police officer was sitting quietly in a chair to Doodle’s right. Female. Black. Details that surprised Doodle for no good reason. Like the woman was wearing a police costume. Her legs were crossed like a man’s, her uniform hat hung on her knee, her eyes intent on the TV mounted on the wall, a reporter in Bienville Square murmuring on about the coming storm. The policewoman was pretty, or she might have been if she hadn’t looked so stern.
Doodle lowered herself into a chair and tried to remember what the duty nurse had told her about her mother’s condition but she couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t stop seeing her mother in bed, that faraway expression on her face. And what she’d said. That was the worst thing. “Your father will be home soon.” There had passed a moment after hearing her mother’s words when Doodle felt lifted outside of time. The past was not the past and she was still a girl, putting off bath time because bath time meant bedtime close upon its heels, and her father really would be home within the hour. Then her mother had shut her eyes and refused to open them again.
Doodle fished her phone from her purse but the battery was dead. That was so exactly like her it made her grit her teeth. She’d already left voice mails for Angus, both at home and on his cell, left a message for Percy with the caretaker up at Horseshoe Bend, and she wanted to try Russell again at the hotel. He had no idea what was happening, she knew that, but she couldn’t help feeling angry that he’d abandoned her to deal with this alone.
Her father had never entirely approved of Russell, not because he didn’t like him—everybody liked Russell—but because he was terrified of dentists. Technically, Russell was an orthodontist but her father lumped anyone who chose to work with their hands in other people’s mouths into a single, sadistic bunch. He was so terrified, in fact, that before Doodle was born, before he married her mother, he’d felt the ache of a cavity and instead of having it filled, he’d gone from dentist to dentist until he found someone unscrupulous enough to pull his teeth. All of them. One final, terrible agony, so he’d never have to sit in a dentist’s chair again. Some of her most vivid memories from childhood: her father with his dentures removed, his mouth collapsed like an old man’s in a young, otherwise handsome face. The sound he made sucking on his dentures when he was lost in thought. The dentures themselves, like a prop, in a glass beside his bed. What he’d done had seemed more brave than ridiculous to Doodle when she was a girl.
A nurse appeared in the doorway with a doctor at her side and Doodle straightened up in case they were looking for her. She dropped the phone into her purse, lifted the purse into her lap. But the nurse pointed the doctor in the direction of the policewoman—relief flooded Doodle—and he crossed the room, wiping his hands on the backs of his scrubs. You could tell from his expression that he had no good news to give her.
“Officer Pruitt?” the doctor said, and Officer Pruitt stood.
Doodle inventoried her purse to keep from staring: phone, lipstick, Kleenex, hand sanitizer, wallet, hairbrush, Visa bill, Amex bill—she was hiding these from Russell—and a permission slip for Lucy’s school that she kept meaning to sign.
When the doctor spoke again, his voice was so soft that Doodle couldn’t make out his words, but Officer Pruitt said, “Don’t you tell me that.”
Doodle didn’t want to hear the rest. She pushed to her feet, found her way back to the nurse’s station. Someone new was manning the desk. The phone was ringing and the nurse held up a finger for Doodle to be patient while she took the call. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just came on. All right. I’ll tell him if I see him.” She hung up, sighed, turned her attention to Doodle. “What can I do for you?” she said.
Muriel gasped awake from a dream of forgetfulness and water. She was alone in bed. Angus was crying in the bassinette but she had a sense, nothing more, that it wasn’t him who woke her, that whatever had called her up from sleep had roused her son as well. She couldn’t be sure if the alarm clanging through her was a response to this sensation or to some vague, edgy residue of her dream. She clutched the blanket to her chest and listened for her husband, heard a chair scrape on the balcony, a cough. Reassured, she went to comfort Angus. The clock on the nightstand said half past one. It wasn’t time yet for his bottle. She was rocking him in the glider, calming herself as much as him, when she heard a door close in the kitchen.
There were two stairwells in the house, one leading from the back hall to the landing outside Doodle’s room, the other from the front door to a landing that separated the master suite from Percy’s room, the room Angus would share as soon as Muriel was ready to let him go. That’s where she was headed, inhaling the baby’s scent as she crossed the landing to look in on his brother, but even the smell of him wasn’t enough to put her at ease. The door to the balcony was ajar, cigarette smoke and winter seeping in. She found Percy balled up on the mattress, knees tucked under his chest, elbows pulled in close, face mashed nose-first into the pillow like he was attempting to burrow deeper into his dreams. She covered him, then stepped out onto the balcony.
A.B. had his feet propped up on the wrought-iron table, highball glass in one hand, cigarette in the other. Muriel was blessed with a gift for slumber. She looked forward to it, had been known, when she was young, to embark on daylong voyages of sleep. She took comfort in the act of shutting her eyes and leaving the world behind. Her husband was not so lucky. He swore that he was incapable of falling asleep until he quite literally couldn’t keep his eyes open one minute longer, swore that if he tried, worry would crank his mind up and he couldn’t make it stop. Most nights, no matter the weather, he would kiss her goodnight and adjourn to the balcony where he waited for exhaustion to befall him. Often as not, he never made it into bed. She’d find him still out there in the morning, head resting on his arms like a schoolboy dozing at his desk.
He didn’t notice her watching him, her shadow leaning toward him from the door. He appeared so perfectly within himself, she was tempted to leave him be, but she remembered the door closing downstairs, an ordinary sound made menacing by the hour.
“Did you hear something?” she whispered.
As if the act required effort, he turned, dropped his feet to the floor. The ice rattled in his glass. With a warmth at odds with his rough voice, he said, “Hey, little mother. How’s my little man?”
Light from the landing tangled up in his smoke.
“I heard something in the kitchen,” she said.
“Percy?”
“He’s in bed. I looked.”
“What about Doodle?”
“You look,” she said. “I don’t want to go by myself.”
Muriel could almost see him deciding that this was something womanish, his tired wife hearing noises in the middle of the night, nothing to worry about. He stood and touched her shoulder and she could smell the whiskey on him as he passed. She followed him back through their bedroom and out onto the other landing, moving now toward Doodle’s room. Muriel hoped it wasn’t Doodle. She had been in the middle of a tantrum when A.B. got home from work and he was not pleased, and Muriel worried that if she was out of bed now without permission, he’d lose his temper. His hand was on the knob when they heard cabinets opening and closing in the kitchen, water running in the sink. Doodle couldn’t reach the cabinets. A.B. hesitated, peeked in her room just to be sure.
When he turned back to Muriel, he brought a finger to his lips and mouthed, “Stay here.”
Angus had dozed off in her arms and she hugged him to her while A.B. slipped back into the bedroom. He returned holding the pistol he kept hidden in a lockbox in the closet.
He shouted, “Is somebody in my house?”
A moment later came the answer. “Yes.” That one word, matter-of-fact, reasonable, thoroughly unintimidated. A man’s voice. Something about its lack of emotion made her heart race in her chest.
“Well, who is it?” A.B. said.
“It’s me,” the voice said at last.
“Are you robbing me, cocksucker?”
The voice said, “I don’t know.”
A.B. looked at her. She didn’t know what she was seeing in his face. Then he made sure the pistol was loaded. Then he crept on down the stairs.
He knew Babydoll would be watching one of her programs in the den, so Lester took Percy around back, let him in through the kitchen, left him alone to make his call. The trailer was spotless, reeked of bleach. Babydoll liked to stay ahead of a mess and there wasn’t much for her to do in the woods except clean house and work in her garden. That and look at the TV. She never acted like she minded, though. She didn’t know anything else, to tell the truth, and no doubt this was better than what she’d had growing up in Vietnam. Which was nothing. Dirt floors. Rice and cabbage. Bowel movements in a field. And he was always buying her new things. Like that home theater system taking up most of the den. Screen big as the hood of his truck. Lester had installed the satellite himself.
He went in there now, cupped his hand over the top of her head and she leaned into his palm without looking away from the screen. She was so small he had to order her clothes from children’s catalogs.
“We got company,” he said.
She chattered at him. Babydoll understood more English than she spoke and Lester spoke more Vietnamese than he understood but he always managed to get her drift, which in this case was, why didn’t those people get a phone so they wouldn’t have to be coming around to her house, tracking dirt in on her floors?
He dropped his hands to her shoulders, massaged the way she liked, kissed the part in her hair.
“Fix the man something to drink.”
He took her place on the couch when she was gone, switched channels. He wanted to check in on the hurricane. Likely it would make some noise up here. They had a man stationed on the street in downtown Mobile. Not much weather yet but the man said landfall sooner than expected. Hurricane Raphael had picked up speed. He was switching back to Babydoll’s program just as Percy came into the room.