This idea pleased him so much that he was swept away for a quarter hour while Marshburn bought him beers. Once Clay caught a reflection of the two of them in the mirror behind the bar and noticed what a strange pair they made: tanned Marshburn with his polo shirt and khaki shorts, Clay in his black jeans and tank top, his body pale and a little puddly from weeks of sitting around the apartment rolling samples for clients and watching endless hours of tube.
Marshburn was talking about the drugstore when Clay came back into the conversation, how the owner underpaid everyone there and treated them like dirt, how Ruth threatened every day to quit. Marshburn said he was glad this was only a summer job; he couldn’t think of spending the rest of his life, even the rest of the year, slaving away in a place like that.
The way he claimed to feel sorry for Ruth, yet in the next breath was glad to be getting out, aroused Clay’s hatred. He had come here to tell Marshburn to fuck off and here he was drinking with the guy, listening to him whine. He studied Marshburn’s hands, which held a sweaty beer but had once disappeared down Linda’s pants.
“Why are you doing this?” Clay said. “Why are you going along with me? Because of what you did to Linda?”
Marshburn slid his mug around on the bar, leaving watery trails. His cocky smile seemed intended to offer Clay a variety of reasons.
“Why the hell else would you?” said Clay.
“Hard not to steal from a place that pays what that asshole does. It’s harder to steal syringes of course, there’s paperwork involved, but hell, he sells them all the time and forges the papers, so why shouldn’t I?”
“You stole from there before?”
Marshburn laughed aloud. “Everybody does. I bet Ruth hasn’t bought any shampoo in a year and a half. Toilet paper, razor blades, whatever.”
While Clay considered his great act of retribution, Marshburn lowered his voice and began talking, eyeing a table of girls across the room but aiming his words into Clay’s ear. The words leaked from his mouth like smoke and hung about them in clouds, and even though Clay had come here with his own script written and ready to deliver, the thought of Ruth’s bathroom cabinet crammed with stolen toiletries took his words away. Marshburn ordered another round and tapped his bottle against Clay’s; the clink of glass seemed absurdly loud to Clay, rising above bar chatter, jukebox and the crack of pool balls, and when it finally died down Clay asked Marshburn to run it all down for him again and craned to hear the words which would tell him what to do, how to make this pay.
Marshburn’s car was a junker: seats sprung and coils exposed, tufts of colored batting filling the air every time Clay shifted in the seat. Clay sneered as Marshburn cranked the radio up with a few twists of a socket wrench. The boy was obviously slumming. Clay knew of other rich kids who drove beat-to-shit cars to be funky, for a joke.
“What’s your dad do, Marshburn?”
“Repairs typewriters,” Marshburn said rotely, as if he’d been asked this a thousand times and all the reluctance to tell had seeped out with the first nine hundred. Clay started to ask about the mother, but he realized that it didn’t much matter. If the dad repaired typewriters, the mom was not likely to be running for mayor.
Marshburn had not gone a block before he whipped into a convenience store, hopped out, and left four words lingering in the car with Clay — “beers for the road.” This was the way Clay and Peterson used to do it — hit a bar for a few hours, then cruise the streets with a six until all their fear was watered down.
Marshburn had left the car running, and its ragged idle drew stares from others waiting in cars parked close. Clay watched Marshburn palm a six from the cooler and slink drunkenly up to the counter. He thought of something Linda said a few weeks ago, how in the middle of class she used to turn around and hiss at Marshburn to stop. He wondered if some people in that class, in their school, and all across the city referred to Linda in the way that her mom described her patients, as That Girl Neal Marshburn Used to Feel Up in Ninth Grade.
As they cruised, Clay downed two beers and looked out the window, grunting occasionally in response to the things Marshburn said. Marshburn wasn’t horrible, though he talked too much. He’d started up about Ruth, not so veiled references to the extended lunch hours the two of them took. Clay kept quiet, which seemed to make Marshburn more brazen.
“You used to go out with her, too, I hear.”
“That was years ago,” said Clay.
“Hard to remember that far back, right?”
Clay felt like bolting from the car, though they were doing fifty at least. He fell silent, wondering how he could back out, but the thought of the look on Marshburn’s face when Clay made his lame excuses kept him quiet.
Marshburn parked a few stores down from the drugstore. They got out of the car at the same time and moved off in the shadows to take leaks against opposite sides of a Dumpster. Marshburn talked the whole time, but his words were unintelligible, even when the sounds of their streams dwindled from a steady metallic pelt to a dull drumming and, finally as their bladders emptied, a dribbling in the dirt. Clay was too jittery to listen; he hadn’t done this since he’d been caught doing it, sent to jail for it. Hell, he was still on probation because of it. It was something he said he’d never do again, but that was before Marshburn.
He thought of sending Marshburn in alone, but earlier in the bar it became clear that Marshburn didn’t know the good stuff when he started talking 3 mg phenobarb. Aspirin, stuff they give to neurotic cats. And Diazepam — pink and heartshaped, valentine candy. If someone was going in, might as well go for the controlled. When Marshburn said he’d never noticed any cabinet, Clay wrote him off as hopeless. Once inside, he’d make him use his hands. Marshburn was wasted enough to leave his prints around like clothes cast off after a late-night binge.
They stood in the shadows for a long time, Clay half-listening to Marshburn describe in too great detail this air-conditioning duct idea of his. He sputtered describing it, as if it was some great secret. This is like a game to him, Clay realized, like Linda sitting in front of him in her blue hip-huggers in fourth-period English.
“You’re sure we can get through?”
“I was just in there. Asshole owner made me check it out to make sure something wasn’t blocking it. He thought the repairman screwed it up instead of fixing it. Thinks everybody’s lying to him, trying to get over on him.”
“Let’s do it then,” said Clay. He pushed away an image of Linda at home asleep, her head at the foot of the foldout the way they had to lie to keep the skeleton of the frame from pressing into their own bones. Maybe he would clear enough dough here to get them out of that box or at least buy Linda that water bed she’d wanted. He sought out the script to tell him what he was doing was right, and alongside Marshburn the words came easily. Underneath the store they crawled through the cool dirt, pipes grazing their heads and chunks of rock and concrete digging into their palms. Marshburn sparked a plastic lighter to find the duct. In darkness again, Clay heard the aluminum of the duct pop under Marshburn’s weight. Filling his lungs with fresh air, he climbed in after him.
They crawled through the dark. Once Clay whispered to Marshburn, How much farther, and he immediately felt whiny, like a kid strapped into the backseat of a station wagon. The darkness inside the duct was so total that moving through it did not seem like moving at all; something else was moving, something inside of Clay, something deep and barely fathomable, which he’d never felt before. When the whoosh came, Clay thought at first that it came from inside his head, beer buzz and nervousness and the changes of the last few weeks combining and combusting, producing this noise that would blow in lines to trade with Marsh-burn from the script they shared. It was only after the chilled blast hit that Clay realized that the air-conditioning had clicked on.
Marshburn was startled, too. He stopped crawling and hunkered, and when Clay ran into him he began to flail, sweeping his arms back and forth as if he was being attacked. When Marshburn’
s hand brushed his forehead, Clay recoiled in the darkness. There he cowered, longing for a way to suspend himself in the frigid breeze so as not to touch the metal walls, which gave to his touch like yielding flesh but were cold enough to burn.
Off Island
AFTER SO MANY STORMS hit the island the people started to move away. In the end it was only Henry Thornton on one side of the creek, Miss Maggie and Miss Whaley on the other. Sisters: Miss Maggie with her dirty same old skirt and Henry’s old waders she used to slosh across the creek, Maggie hugging on him nights when she got into her rum and came swishing down to his place to hide out from her sister. Henry hid out from Miss Whaley himself, stuck close to his house down the creek where his family had stayed since anyone could remember. Three bodies left on the island and a Colored Town right on until the end. Every day Henry would cross the creek up to where his white women lived: sisters, but Miss Maggie had got married and could go by her first name instead of Whaley which her older sister by three years clung to like the three of them clung firm to their six square miles of sea oat and hummock afloat off the elbow of North Carolina.
Across the sound it got to be 1979. Henry’s oldest boy Crawl gave up fishing menhaden out of Morehead to run a club. He wrote Henry that he’d purchased this disco ball. Miss Maggie read the letter out to Henry on the steps of the church one warm night. Henry told her, Write Crawl, tell him send one over, we’ll run it off the generator in the church, hang it up above the old organ, have this disco dance. Henry made a list in his head of everybody he’d invite back, all of them who’d left out of there after Bertha blew through and took the power and the light. Crawl wrote how that ball spinning under special bulbs would glitter diamonds all up and down your partner. Miss Maggie snickered, said, I ain’t about to take a letter and tell him that. Imagine what Whaley would do come some Saturday night when we’re dancing in a light bound to suffer her a hot flash. Up under his breath Henry said, We? Ain’t no we. In his head he was twirling his Sarah around in a waterspout of diamonds. Tell everybody come back for the disco, Crawl, he wrote in his head. All of his eleven children and Miss Maggie’s son Curt, the prison guard, up in Raleigh. Hell, Crawl, invite back those Coast Guard boys and some of the summer people even. He was sealing up his letter when he looked out across the marsh to where night came rolling blue black and final over the sound. He ripped that letter open and crossed it all out and said instead, No thank you, son, to some disco ball, we got stars.
Every morning Henry poled his skiff out into the shallows to fish for dinner. He stayed out in good weather to meet the O’Neal boys bringing in the mail off the Cedar Island ferry. Be sure you give me all them flyers, he’d say every time, and the O’Neals would hand him a sack of grocery store circulars sent over from the mainland advertising everything. Miss Whaley liked to call out the prices at night. “They got turkey breast twenty-nine cent a pound.” All it took to make Henry wonder how come he stayed was to sit around long enough to hear Whaley say this three times a night about a two-week-old manager’s special one hundred miles up in Norfolk. Crawl was always after him to move off island, had come after him six times since Bertha. You don’t got to stay here looking after the sisters daddy till they die or you one. Come on, get in the boat. Crawl showed up wearing his hair springy long and those wide-legged pants made out of some rough something, looked like cardboard, to where your legs couldn’t breathe. Boots don’t ought to come with a zipper. Why would Henry want to climb in any boat with duded-up Crawl? He would keep quiet watch his grandbabies poking around the beach and going in and out of the houses standing empty waiting on their owners to come back, sitting right up on brickbat haunches pouting like a dog will do you when you go off for a while. He would watch his grandsons jerk crabs out the sound on a chicken liver he give them and having themselves some big easy time until they hit that eye-cutting age. Look at Granddaddy fussing after his white women, what for? Henry would look at them not looking at him and hear the words out of Crawl’s mouth all across the Pamlico Sound and all the way back. Your granddaddy don’t want to change none. That island gonna blow and him with it one of these days.
What would Henry Thornton be across the sound? Now, who? This he could not say but it wasn’t what they all thought: scared to find out. Maybe fear was what kept the sisters from leaving, though they had their other reasons. Maggie would do right much what her big sister said do when it came down to it. Miss Whaley stayed on partly for the state boys who came down from Raleigh every spring before the mosquitoes rode the land breeze over. Every April a boatload of them, always this fat bearded one with his bird glasses and often a young white girl who asked most of the questions. They’d get the answers up on a tape machine, so Henry called them the Tape Recorders. Miss Whaley’d put on her high-tider talk the Tape Recorders loved to call an Old English brogue. They said Henry spoke it too, though how he could have come out talking like an Old English, they didn’t tell him that. He didn’t ask. He didn’t care to talk for them, but it didn’t matter much because Miss Whaley loved a tape recorder. Every year she’d tell them about her father’s daddy got arrested in Elizabeth City because he favored the man shot Abraham Lincoln who was loose at the time. She didn’t mention he was over there on a drunk. Sometimes Maggie would, though, and cackle right crazy loud. Miss Whaley every time would tell about Henry’s younger brother Al Louie Thornton who cooked for the guests over at the first lodge before it washed away and who was known over the island for wearing bras and panties and shaved his chest hairs and plucked around his nipples and painted his toenails. Sometimes he’d cook in his apron and shirt and that’s all. Babe Ruth came over to hunt, they took him back in the kitchen to meet Al Louie. Babe Ruth took Al Louie’s autograph, though Miss Whaley left that part out, too.
One year the tiny white girl pulled Henry aside, said, That lady’s digging dirt all the way around your family tree, Mister Henry, serves her right if you want to return the favor. Wanting Henry to tell it on a tape machine, Miss Whaley almost getting married three times and then falling all over Miss Maggie’s, her own sister’s, husband, the no-fishingest man ever born on island and some said a thief. Henry could have taped that and more. He could have had Miss Whaley showing her white ass in some book right alongside Al Louie’s black-aproned ass. But he just gave that little girl a smile and said, I don’t no more hear her than the wind after seventy-some years on this island and last six with just us three.
The Tape Recorders were all the time trying to get Henry to act like he hadn’t ever been off island much at all. He played them like they wanted, even though he’d spent two years at the Coast Guard base up in Weeksville and six years in the Norfolk shipyards. There he took up welding and did decent at it. Now his children reached right up the East Coast to Troy, New York, like stops on a train. Morehead, Elizabeth City, Norfolk, Baltimore, Philly, Newark, Brooklyn, up all the way to Kingston and Troy. He’d took that train many times when Sarah was alive. She loved it off island. All the time talking about moving, retiring she called it. But what was there to retire from? Wasn’t any after to sit down from on this island. Henry came back to the island a damn good welder but what was it to weld? Can’t weld conch shell, seaweed, fishbone. He bought some pigs and chickens off his brother and later on two milk cows from the O’Neals and got by selling crabs and flounder to O’Neal who turned right around, sold to the wholesalers in Hatteras for what Henry knew was some serious profit.
Two storms before Bertha, the one that opened up a new inlet down on the southern tip of the island, Sarah bled to death on the kitchen floor. Henry had got caught over in Ocracoke on errands for the sisters and what it was was the wind. Henry’d tacked the kitchen on himself out of washed up timber mostly and some he’d traded the O’Neals for, which wasn’t much better grade than what the tide brung up. And Henry’s hand-hammered kitchen falling, slashing a hole in his Sarah’s forehead. Sarah lying on the floor in the rain, her blood running the brown boards black. Before he left he’d asked the sis
ters, y’all check up on Sarah while I’m gone. Sarah wasn’t nearly as friendly with them as Henry. Maybe because they were women and it had got down to four of them, three women and one man to run man things. Sarah did not stomach Miss Whaley’s attitude and as for Miss Maggie’s mess when she took a drink and came right up close enough to Henry to blink cross-eyed (maybe because at that particular nearness he won’t even black just blurry), well, Sarah knew it. She studied everything but didn’t say one word to Henry about it even though he knew when she knew something, he could read her just like he could the wind and the sound and the sky. If Henry wasn’t there to drag her across the creek nights she’d have stayed home singing those gospel songs Crawl’s wife taped her off the radio. They had the lights then and Sarah favored this Al Green she said had a voice smooth as liver. Maybe she was singing her Al Green right up until Henry’s kitchen came down on her and do you know the timber he cobbled that kitchen out of blew right off island? Ocean brung it to him, wind took it away. And left Sarah lying out on the floor holding a pair of scissors in her hand, what for? What was she fixing to cut? The sight of those scissors drove Henry crazy. He pried them out of her fist and flung them into the inlet and tried not to look at her head whichways upside the stove.
She wouldn’t let me go after her, Miss Maggie told Henry talking about Whaley, which Whaley herself was big enough to admit. Why lose two to save one? she said. Sarah bled to death and it turned up big-skied sunny like it will do after a storm to make you feel worse and the sun dried the blood on the floorboards until it looked like paint. Toting the wood down island is how he discovered the new inlet. And in his mind it was Sarah cut the island in two. Sheared right through the marshland with her sewing scissors. Low tide he’d walk over to the good-for-nothing-but-birdshit southside. He’d crouch and smoke him an El Reeso Sweet if he could get one off the O’Neals. Wasn’t one thing over there worth seeing but he knew Sarah was wanting him where the sisters weren’t.
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