“Yeah,” Sally said. “You kissed me and Danny behaved like a horse’s ass.”
“I just behaved like a husband,” I said. “What did you expect me to do?”
“It was none of your business,” she said. “I always kiss people when I’m drunk.”
“Now, now, now, now,” Godwin said. “Really, now.”
“Have you actually read skaldic verse?” I asked.
“I read the Times Literary Supplement regularly,” he said.
“I don’t want to talk about reading,” Sally said. “You two should have got married. You both know too much about books.”
I decided I had better remind Godwin he couldn’t go all the way with us. I didn’t want him to think I was a fool—or a marshmallow.
“You have to get a bus back to Austin,” I said. “We can’t take you to California with us.”
Sally looked at me as if I had said something very inhuman, but Godwin didn’t seem surprised. “You won’t abandon me here, will you?” he asked, looking out at Del Rio as if he expected to see vultures circling in the sky. I couldn’t really blame him. It was bleak country.
“No,” I said. “You can ride with us to Junction and get a bus straight back to Austin.”
“Righto,” he said gamely.
But he was sly. We hadn’t driven twenty miles before he began to get sick. I knew immediately that it was just another performance, but this time it was the kind of virtuoso performance that Sally was susceptible to. Godwin was clever. He pretended he was trying to be stoic. Now and then he would groan, making it sound as if the groan had been wrenched from him inadvertently. Sally asked him what was the matter.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Could have been the hot dog.”
Slyly, he had eaten a hot dog, whereas Sally and I had eaten cheeseburgers. I had no way of disproving that he had been poisoned. The drive-in had been pretty fly-blown. Godwin became limper and limper and made himself look sicker and sicker. The country we were going through was dippy and he pretended the dipping gave him great pain.
“Vile place,” he said. “I shall have a colon spasm if I’m not lucky.”
“I’m worried about him,” Sally said. “Maybe he’s got ptomaine.”
All I was worried about was how to get him out of the car, once we came to Junction. The clouds seemed to be coming lower. “We might be going to have a flash flood,” I said. “I hope he can swim.”
They both looked at me as if I were crazy. “Are you nuts?” Sally said. “This is the desert. There’s no water in miles of here.”
Less than fifteen minutes later Godwin was over his illness and he and Sally had both come to realize that deserts are very good places for flash floods. The heavens had simply opened. Heavy drops of rain were followed by heavy sheets of rain. In no time, maybe three minutes, the road was covered. The dips began to fill. In ten minutes the highway, at its levelest, had a foot of water on it. In the dips it was halfway up our fenders. We could hardly see anything. We might as well have been under a waterfall. I slowed to two miles an hour. Sally looked scared. The rain beat so loudly on the roof of the car that none of us could think. I went into a dip and water sloshed over the fenders. There was a strong current pushing across the road, making the car hard to hold. We were in a narrow arroyo and almost didn’t get across, but we inched on in low and gradually began to climb the next rise.
“Look,” Godwin said, “I can swim, you remember that. The question is, What does one swim for? I can’t see a bloody thing.”
Neither could I, but I could tell we were going up instead of down. The water got shallower. The minute I felt us going down again I stopped. We were on top of a dip.
“I don’t know why I married you,” Sally said. “I bet we all drown.”
She began to cry, but neither Godwin nor I had time for her. The water was getting deeper, outside the car. I backed up until I judged us to be right on top of the high place between dips. It was a little better than bumper deep.
Despite having predicted that there would be one, I really knew nothing about flash floods. I had no idea how deep it might get. I set the emergency brake. Sheets of water were still slapping against the windshield. Our breath had caused the windows to fog over, making it still more difficult to see.
“I guess we ought to get on top of the car,” I said. “I don’t know if it will wash away, but I don’t want to be in it if it does.”
“I have been watching the countryside,” Godwin said. “There’s not a bloody fucking thing out there. It must be miles to a house. There aren’t even trees.”
“There are barbed-wire fences,” I said. The car was rocking and we all felt claustrophobic. I wanted out. So did Godwin. We counted three and I jumped out in the rain. Water was almost to my knees. Godwin got out too. We practically had to pull Sally out. It soaked us instantly, but once we got soaked it wasn’t quite so terrifying. It was a very hard rainstorm though. Streams of water ran off the car, as well as under it. Godwin slipped and fell down. After that he clung to one of the door handles. He was terrified of being swept away into endless miles of West Texas. I managed to get Sally up on the rear end, but that was as high as any of us got. She sat there, trying not to drown, and Godwin clung grimly to the door handle. I simply stood by the car, water swirling around my legs, trying to hit on a plan. Undoubtedly the barbed-wire fences were under water, so there was no point in trying to swim to one of them. They would probably just cut us to shreds. My wet hair was in my eyes and I couldn’t have seen any distance at all even if it hadn’t been, so it was very hard for me to make a good plan. I held Sally’s hand, so we wouldn’t get separated. Not getting separated from her was the chief element of my plan.
Fortunately, the flood began to end. The water was only three inches above my knees. The rain began to ease up, so that we could see one another better. Then it slacked enough so that we could see across the road. At about that point we began to hear screaming. I guess the rain had been drowning it out. It was Mexican screaming and it wasn’t far away. I remembered we had passed an old bus of some kind, just as the flood hit. Godwin let go the door handle and came back where I was, to listen.
“Those are sounds of distress,” he said.
“You two stay here,” Sally said. She held my hand with both of hers. Godwin waded a few steps back of the car, peering into the rain. It was definitely stopping, but Sally didn’t realize it. The screams seemed mostly to be the names of saints.
“My God,” Godwin said. Then he began to wave his hands. “Here, here!” he yelled. “Don’t give up! We’re coming!” I still couldn’t see whatever it was he saw, but it was obvious he was about to do something impulsive. He began to strip, yelling, “Here! Here! Don’t give up!” as he did. He flung his shirt behind him, then his pants. They immediately washed away. I don’t know if they were ever seen again. I could see some kind of bus, down in the dip where the water was really deep, and I shook free of Sally and waded toward Godwin. He had somehow managed to get his pants off without removing but one shoe, and he was standing on one foot in the current and struggling with the other shoe. When he got it off he dropped it in the water and immediately splashed down the little slope and dove into the brown water.
It struck me as madness, but the rain grew light enough that I could at least see what had prompted him to do it. From where I stood it looked like a Mexican village was drowning. The old bus I had passed was drowned out almost at the bottom of the dip in the road, where the water was at least six or eight feet deep by this time. The bus had contained numerous Mexicans, either a small village or a very large family. Several soaked Mexican kids were sitting on top of the bus and others were trying to clamber up. One goat was on top of the bus and three or four more were swimming unhappily around it, making goat noises. Three very wet dogs were swimming around with the goats, looking as if their hour had come. Several squawking chickens, their feet tied together, were in the process of washing away, and a very fat Mexican woman who
clung to the door of the bus kept yelling about the chickens and calling out the names of saints. She saw Godwin, who was swimming toward them in a classic crawl, and it merely seemed to alarm her the more. Two tiny Mexican men were vainly trying to break her hold on the door and hoist her onto the bus. A young woman began to crawl out one window of the bus, a baby in her hands. She slipped and dropped the baby, which splashed into the brown water. I began to take off my shirt. Godwin looked up and saw the baby fall and quickly redoubled his efforts. They were not necessary though. The young woman didn’t seem to be flustered. The baby bobbed up and she reached down, picked it out of the water and handed it up to a kid on the roof of the bus. It began to squall. The tiny men had broken the fat woman’s hold on the door. It seemed for a moment that they too would be swept away, but the current was sweeping them against the bus instead of around it. Godwin arrived at that time, to everyone’s consternation. The fat woman screamed. One of the dogs immediately swam toward him, menacingly. Godwin lost his nerve and swam back a little way, pursued by the sinister wet dog. The goats didn’t like him, either. He began to swim after the drowning chickens, but the chickens were long gone. One tiny man got on top of the bus and pulled at the fat woman’s hand, while the other stayed in the water and pushed on her ass. The young woman had managed to get on top of the bus and was nursing her baby. The clouds broke open at that moment and the bright West Texas sun shone over the desert. The water where I stood was receding and it was obvious there was no longer a real need to get the fat woman onto the bus, but the Mexicans didn’t notice. The one in the water was near to drowning and couldn’t be blamed for not noticing that the danger had passed. Godwin was no help at all. He was swimming forlornly in a wide circle around the bus, followed by a goat and the mean brown dog, who yapped at him from time to time. Finally, by a great team effort, the two Mexicans hoisted the fat woman to safety amid the children. One child dove in for a swim. Sally realized that the danger was over and waded out to where I was watching. The water in the dip was still quite deep, but the sun had split the clouds for good. The young woman still nursed the baby, and the fat woman chattered at the men, who chattered at Godwin, whose strength was ebbing. His gallant rescue attempt was either going to get him dog-bit or drowned—or maybe both. I wanted to throw a rock at the dog, but I couldn’t find one. A goat clambered up on the hood of the bus, giving Godwin an idea. He swam to the hood and pulled himself up beside the goat. Apparently the current had sucked away his underpants, because he was naked. Back down the road I could see other cars stranded on other humps. The young woman giggled at Godwin and the old fat woman scowled at him and made furious sounds of outrage. Perhaps she hadn’t realized he had been coming to help. Godwin kept the brown dog at bay by splashing water in its face. This made the dog furious, but there was nothing it could do about it. The kid who had gone swimming grabbed the tail of a goat and let the goat tow him. Godwin looked sheepish and kept his legs crossed. Several of the kids sat looking at him. He smiled appealingly at the woman who was nursing the baby.
“Look at him,” Sally said. “He’s already thinking about screwing her. Let’s go off and leave him.”
It had just occurred to me that I ought to go off and leave him. It would be the perfect way to get rid of him. If I let him ride to Junction he would con me into letting him ride to El Paso. He would feign illness, or do something equally sly. If he had only kept his clothes on I could have gone off and left him in no time and never given it a thought. The Mexicans could haul him to Junction. But his clothes and all his money had washed away. He was naked and not among friends. West Texans were not apt to take kindly to a naked Englishman. His best chance lay with the Mexicans, but the matriarch of the bus didn’t seem to like his looks.
When I heard Sally suggest it, I knew I couldn’t do it. I felt tired of things. The flood had been almost fun—the Mexican kids were having a jolly time in what was left of it. But Sally shouldn’t have suggested going off and leaving Godwin. It made everything seem wrong. She was the one who was supposed to have loyalties to him. I didn’t like being put in the position of having to be loyal to my worst rival.
“We can’t go off and leave him,” I said. “His clothes have washed away.”
“Big deal,” she said. “He goes around naked half the time anyway.”
“Not in the middle of the desert, he doesn’t,” I said.
“I thought you wanted to get rid of him,” she said, looking at me closely. She had a genius for making me feel on the spot. Even in the aftermath of a real flood I felt on the spot.
“I do,” I said, “but look at him. He’s naked, he’s broke, and he’s among strangers. We can’t go off and leave him that way.”
“I could,” Sally said. “I’ll be glad when I get a baby.” She looked darkly at the young Mexican woman on top of the bus. Then she went to the car and changed her wet clothes. I waved for Godwin to swim back.
“Just catching my breath,” he yelled. The brown dog had lost interest. I think Godwin really was intrigued by the young woman, and I couldn’t blame him. She was smiling and one of her lovely breasts was bare. But it looked hopeless: to get to her he would have had to plow through a crowd of goats, kids, and little brown men. After some more grinning back and forth he slid into the water and swam to our side of the dip.
“I liked Texas from the first,” he said, looking across the desert. It was by then a desert full of water puddles, with a bright sun shining on them.
“Why?”
“Oh, you know, surprises,” he said. “Something happening all the time.” He managed to find one shoe.
When we got to the car Sally was just struggling into some dry blue jeans. I gave Godwin a shirt and some pants, but he seemed in no great hurry to get dressed. The swim had invigorated him.
“Quite an adventure,” he said. “Travel never fails to bring home to me what a fucking bore the university is. This is country a man can pit himself against. All it needs is a few bloody Arabs and it could be North Africa. I was there, you know, in the last days of the Raj. Wonderful times. Spit and polish such as will never be seen again.”
“You know good and well why you liked it,” Sally said. “There were lots of little brown boys for you to screw.”
Godwin was just putting on the shirt I had given him. He was highly insulted. “I’ll ask you to apologize for that, love,” he said. “I have never, as you put it, screwed a boy in my life.”
“Oh yeah?” Sally said.
“Apologize!” he shouted suddenly. “I’m no bloody pederast. I loathe pederasts! They’re the scum of the earth. Apologize!”
“Fuck you,” Sally said. “I wouldn’t apologize to you if you were the last man alive. Put your pants on so we can go”
Godwin had just stepped into his pants, but what she said made him insane with rage. He sloshed around the car, furious, and grabbed Sally by her long wet hair and started trying to drag her out the car window.
“You fucking little whore, I’ll drown you,” he said. “I’ve never committed pederasty in my life.” He was really tugging on her hair and Sally was yelling. I was inside the car, holding onto her, but I decided I would have to get out and fight Godwin off. Her hair was long enough that he had wrapped it around one hand. He couldn’t really get her out, but neither of us could break his hold. Sally’s arms and shoulders were out and Godwin seemed to be getting madder.
“You abominable little bitch,” he said. “You’re the fucking destroyer of innocents! Geoffrey knew nothing of women until you got your whory little hands on him. I’ll drown you in the nearest ditch, you evil slut.”
I got out of the car as quickly as I could and was running around it to tackle him when I noticed that all the Mexicans were standing on their bus, watching the fight. Just as I looked off, Godwin screamed horribly. He fell backward in the mud. He had gone into the fray with his pants unzipped and Sally had reached down and zipped him. I don’t know precisely what got caught in the zipper, but it wa
s something tender. Sally calmly rolled the car window up and locked her door. Godwin got up and ran spraddle-legged down the road for several steps and then stopped and extricated himself, yelling curses and making sounds of great pain. He was as wet as if he hadn’t just changed.
“It was a good try, it was a good try,” he said, looking around at me wildly. “Thank God it was only a zipper.”
“She saw you looking at that girl on the bus,” I said.
Godwin looked around and was a little unnerved to see all the Mexicans standing on the bus watching the show. It brought him out of his fit. The young woman had tucked her breast back into her bodice.
“I do like the looks of that child,” Godwin said, waving heartily at the Mexicans. “Look, perhaps I’ll just ride on with them. They’re poor folk. They’ll not turn me down.”
“Big Momma may sic the dogs on you,” I said.
“Nonsense. The woman was hysterical with fear.”
I more or less agreed. The Mexicans would take him in. He clapped me on the shoulder and held out his hand. I shook it.
“You’re something of a gentleman,” he said. “Allow me to give you some advice. Stop in the next town and divorce Sally. I never dreamed you’d marry her or I would have strangled her for you at once, out of simple kindness. As soon as you’re divorced, give up writing. Do those two things at once and you’ve at least a chance for happiness.”
“But I just got a book accepted,” I said. “I’m writing another one. Why should I give it up now?”
Godwin was straightening his shirt collar. He was in the process of assuming a dapper appearance, and bedraggled as he was, he looked rather happy.
“Wait much longer and it may be too late,” he said. “There are no writers in heaven, you know. They don’t even know how to enjoy the bloody earth. Will you say goodbye to Sally for me? I shan’t be seeing her for a while.”
I felt odd. Godwin looked like he wanted to be going, and I had a strange desire to continue the conversation. I felt like I was about to learn something I needed to know.
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers Page 7
