by Nell Zink
Karen’s mind was racing. She had just finished reading Malaparte’s Kaputt and was deeply moved. (The library, like the thrift shop, specialized in the leavings of the elderly dead.) She wanted to talk to Temple about it. She seldom confided in Meg. Like many fresh human beings new to the world, Karen assumed people’s thoughts resembled the things they said. So she didn’t know her mother very well. She had no idea.
Lomax’s financial situation had improved to the point where he was considering investing. Not in anything megalomaniac, like his business partner the ex-SEAL who read Soldier of Fortune and wanted to buy an Antonov and start flying to Chihuahua, but in something more pleasant, the overture to a well-earned retirement. He had always wanted to retire by age thirty. “Live fast, die young,” he would say as he cracked another beer on his grandmother’s flowered glider, barely having moved in ten days except to lie down on her sleeping porch. Lassitude was an accepted hallmark of Southern culture even among Indians on disability, perhaps even more so if their non-Indian (“Irish”) ancestors were mostly Tajik und Uzbek like Lomax’s.
Nonetheless, as it is for many people living more conventional lifestyles, his retirement was supposed to be more exciting than his working life had been. His plan was that in retirement he would fish on the ocean. He had his eye on a deep-V cabin cruiser belonging to a friend who owed him money. He knew it was only a matter of time before it would be his. Then he would lounge on the upholstered bench seat that curved around the back of the boat and watch big marlin come to his lure. He wasn’t yet sure how it worked, but he knew that if you played your cards right, you could land dangerous-looking fish that tasted scrumptious (a word that always wormed its way into his vocabulary after three or four days with his grandmother).
Then came the day when the friend handed over the keys to the boat, saying he had no place to park it anymore since he was moving to a hiding place at an unnamed location until it all blew over. Lomax priced the boat at eight grand and accepted thanks for his generosity. Except he had no place to park it either. He visited his more ambitious friend.
“I was thinking to buy a motel in Yorktown and get a boat slip up there,” Lomax said. “But shit, it all sounds like work. Even with no guests and no vacancies, you still got to keep the books. What the shit kind of a retirement is that? And Flea and Poodle, when I tell them they got shifts on reception, they’re going to lynch my ass.”
“Stop right there, my friend,” the Seal said, holding up his hand.
The Seal gathered his thoughts in silence, then unexpectedly, lyrically, described a house he’d seen on the Eastern Shore. It sat in meadows spiked with volunteer pines and surrounded by serious forest, a big old wooden mansion with porches on every side and a widow’s walk around the roof lantern. From the widow’s walk there was a view across the barrier island to the ocean. There was a boat ramp and a dock on the creek. An earthly paradise. And it belonged to the state for back taxes. Nobody wanted it because you couldn’t develop it. It had an endangered species.
“Won’t that get hairy?” Lomax asked. “Walking into the state and telling them I want to buy a wildlife refuge for cash?”
“Delmarva fox squirrel, dude.”
“Oh, shit,” Lomax said. “Oh, shit!” In retirement they both were consistently kind of wasted and their dialogues were often as cryptic as their thoughts, but Lomax knew exactly what the Seal was trying to say.
When he brought the subject up to his father, he was initially met with raised eyebrows. However, Lomax’s gift was an undeniable godsend for the Virginia Squirrel Conservation Association, established many years before and, by dint of his father’s hard work and dedication, now boasting twenty members, only nine of whom were over seventy-five. The association was happy to accept a substantial windfall in the form of a dedicated capital gift from an anonymous donor. It was a tax-exempt charity, and donations to date had totaled $148. Purchase of a rodent reserve of international importance would catapult it from irrelevance to significant standing in the conservation world. Lomax’s father shook his hand with real appreciation, pumping it up and down. It seemed to Lomax a benevolent fate had intervened to launder his income in a way he never anticipated. As he left his parents’ house he dropped to his knees, crossed himself, and thanked the Great Spirit.
The house on the Eastern Shore had originally been named Kenilworth, but the new sign said KEEP OUT. Lomax called it Satori. It was posted NO HUNTING NO TRESPASSING all the way around its vast perimeter. Except for the big clearing and some areas of open water, it was second-growth wilderness, full of old trees. Lomax and the Seal took up running around. Literally: running around. They would drop acid and race around the clearing in circles like dogs rocketing, and then top it off by diving from the little sandbank at the edge of the old bowling green and rolling over the soft turf like pill bugs, tumbling blissful and invulnerable. With time the Seal became softer and rounder from rolling, Lomax leaner and harder from running. Huge skies of seaborne cloud turned pink in the light of sunset, and swallows and seagulls met and turned away from each other in the air. Thunderstorms brought rains like an Indian monsoon, wet and fast as invisible buckets slicing through the air and sand on their way straight down to China. Twice a week they rubbed filet mignon with garlic and barbecued it. Fridays they alternated crab feast, lobster, and scallops.
Flea took up gardening, hoping to add vegetables to their diet. She didn’t get very far. On her knees in the sand, she planted radishes she thought would sprout in three days and be ready to eat in two weeks. A typical country girl, raised between the TV and the car. Agriculture to her was clouds of pesticide raining down on corn. She knew traditional uses for many wild plants—as toys. Which seeds would fly farthest, how best to step on puffballs, how to make a daisy chain.
Meg’s first visit, she refused to bring Karen, not yet having the lay of the land. She left her in the care of Dee and Cha Cha. It was a smart choice. For whatever reason, the first floor of the house was filled with hay to a depth of six inches. Flea wanted her to stay through the full moon to raise the Wiccan cone of power (she was getting an education of sorts through courses in Virginia Beach), and the Seal wanted her to try his cocaine, which she did. “What is this shit?” she said, looking up with burning eyes. “This is crank.”
“It’s the finest coke on the East Coast,” the Seal insisted.
“Listen to me,” she said. “I know you’re experienced and all, but I used to run behind international faggotry, and I know cocaine when I taste it. This doesn’t even feel like cocaine. Yecch!” She clenched her teeth and shuddered.
“It’s the stuff we been selling,” Lomax said. “Are you telling me they been shitting me?”
“I’m not a chemist,” she said. “But seriously, if you were picking somebody to trust, at random, would you pick a drug dealer?”
“We’re all drug dealers here,” the Seal said.
“Are you wearing a really weird-looking shirt?” Meg asked him.
“It’s my sweatshirt I always wear.”
“Oh shit. I think it’s PCP. Honest to God. Fucking angel dust, man. I can’t believe it. You guys are the worst drug dealers in the whole godforsaken world!” She stood up and sat quickly back down. “Fuck!” she added.
“And we had them all paying cocaine prices,” Lomax said. “Aw, man. We were dicking people over right and left. Is that the kind of person I want to be?”
“Those assholes played us like a violin,” the Seal said. “You can bet if we’d lost one gram, they would have charged us for cocaine. And it was hard work! I mean, it was fun running up the bay in my boat, but it was all night, like swing shifts. For a white trash drug I’m embarrassed to have anything to do with. Shit!”
“I’m worse than you are,” Lomax said. “I went into retail on that shit. But nobody said a word! Doesn’t anybody know what cocaine is anymore? Not me, apparently.”
“People don’t fuck with drug dealers,” the Seal said. “But we should have made f
riends with a chemist.”
“So what’s in that acid Flea says you take all the time?” Meg asked. “Agent Orange?”
“Something jittery for sure. It gets us running around like rabbits.”
“That’s it,” Meg said. “I’m going back to drinking wine.”
“I wasn’t going to retire yet, but I’m losing all my ideals right here, right now,” the Seal said. “I mean it. I’m going to give up narcotics and go to work as a mercenary in Sri Lanka.”
“Sure you are,” Lomax said. “And what about my squirrels? Who’s going to defend my squirrels when you’re out there blowing away Tamil tigers?”
“The squirrels need you, man,” Meg said. “You got to stay. Give me a hit of that wine.” She glugged it and passed the bottle back to Lomax.
“Why don’t we deal booze?” Lomax said. “Like in Prohibition.”
“Are you nuts?” the Seal said. “Going up against a state monopoly! You want the ATF coming down on us? If you’re going to do a crime, you got to do something illegal, so you’re not competing directly with the government. That would be like if I started my own army instead of hiring on in Sri Lanka. Or smuggling cigarettes. That’s not little piss-ant drug dealer shit. For that, you need the Mafia.”
There was a brief silence, broken by the sound of Flea struggling with a thick brownie batter in the kitchen.
“You know what’s fun?” Meg said, leaning forward suddenly. “Tennis. You have any idea what a high that is, when you stroke the ball hard right into a corner? It’s total power and control.”
They turned to face her. “Tennis,” the Seal said. “I mean, popping gooks is a high, too, but I wouldn’t want to do it every day.”
“Tennis never gets boring,” Meg said. “It puts you in a trance. That’s what we should do! Play tennis!”
Lomax blushed, warming to her vision and spontaneously admitting its profound truth. He said, “You know, a tennis court would fit perfect on the old bowling green, and it wouldn’t bug the squirrels none. I like sports. I went duckpin bowling once. Sports would be a nice change from falling down. Flea!”
She padded through the swinging doors, anklets jingling, licking the spatula. “Break out the champagne!” Lomax called out. “We got a new action plan. We’re giving up drugs for tennis!”
“Why would you do that?”
“Don’t ask me. I am higher than a mountain.”
Shortly after that, there was a huge cocaine bust with hundreds of arrests all over the papers, but it didn’t seem to affect anybody they knew. It struck Lomax how funny it would be if he had been transporting angel dust from some lab in Floyd County the whole time, “laundering” it, so to speak, in the Atlantic. Then he realized that he’d never seen it in inner tubes on the shore. Just being unpacked from a flimsy bass boat in Poquoson. And he realized there was a lot he didn’t know. He shook his head and returned to his belated reading of Eastern Chipmunks: Secrets of Their Solitary Lives.
Contractors experienced in the building of tennis courts were rare on the Eastern Shore in those days. But the Seal had built entire landing strips. Meg declared the bowling green off-limits, so he repurposed a parking lot that had been the kitchen garden. From then on, Meg regularly brought along Karen and Temple. (Cha Cha boarded with the Moodys, as dogs were not allowed in the squirrel sanctuary.)
The tennis-playing Temple acquired a retro look that became his uniform: a white cable-knit tennis sweater with a red-and-blue V-neck. When Karen stood next to him, leaning against the sweater with her arms around his torso, she didn’t look white at all. Compared to that sweater, nothing was white. Dee was a master of laundry chemistry. On sunny days, the sweater would hurt your eyes.
Meg began the day’s tennis lesson. The two children took their positions at opposite corners of the court. Temple’s windup was dramatic. What happened next made them all groan. The ball didn’t rise very high, and in a midswing attempt to avoid bonking his racket into his left knee, Temple threw his weight to the right, disregarding his right foot, which turned over. He sat down on the court, holding his ankle in disbelief.
“Smooth move, Arthur Ashe,” Meg said.
“I think I sprained my ankle,” Temple said.
“You need an ice pack,” Meg said. She headed for the house.
“Flea learned a shamanistic technique that would heal that ankle immediately,” Lomax remarked from his Adirondack chair. “She’s used it on me many times.”
“I want to see her do it,” Karen said.
“You know what? I feel all right,” Temple said. “I might try to hop on over to the house.”
“No, stay here so Flea can do shamanistic healing!” Karen said.
“Then at least be my pillow,” Temple said. Karen complied, sitting down cross-legged on the concrete. He arranged his head on her lap and said, “That’s better.” Meg returned with Flea and a dish towel full of ice cubes.
Temple was a little afraid of Flea. It was not difficult for him to let Meg palpate his ankle through his shoe. But when Flea took her place, squatting barefoot before him in her long skirt, and told him to relax so she could summon his totem animal, his thoughts were distilled to one rhythmic litany: No, not now, do not get an erection. She untied his shoelace. “No, please no,” he begged her and himself. He wiggled his foot in self-defense, trying not to kick her. “Please no, Flea. Please.”
“Trust him,” Karen said. “You don’t want to smell his feet.” Flea lowered her hands and backed away, and Temple exhaled.
He felt his body lighten and withdraw from the dangers that surrounded it. He stretched out his arms and felt stillness and birdsong. Beyond the edge of the tennis court was the lawn, and beyond the lawn was the meadow, and beyond the meadow stretched the forest where you could hear the huge crested woodpeckers hard at work building nests for the squirrels. Beyond them lay the back bay, the cities, the oceans, the continents. The earth, endless and replete. The sun, straight up, a blinding hole leading to an immense void.
Temple stared at it unflinching and had an insight that stuck in his mind forever after. Behold the Sheltering Sky, he thought. I was understanding it wrong. It’s not a shelter because it protects you. It’s a way out. A sanctuary, a place you can go when things get out of control. Say for example you cripple yourself hitting a tennis ball and there’s one girl’s sweaty crotch cradling your head and another girl’s perfumed hair tickling your legs and nothing in between them but your dick and nobody watching but the one girl’s mom and the other girl’s boyfriend: There’s no need to run away. You can ascend to the region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. The shelter that received the risen Christ and Port in The Sheltering Sky, that comforted the mortally wounded Prince Andrei and the young W. E. B. Du Bois. Now I know.
Temple closed his eyes and his vision took on a very definite shape. He saw his winged soul appear risen to Karen. She would never doubt his innocence. Even his crucifixion wouldn’t worry her in the least. She was an angel, one of the birds of the air of the Sheltering Sky, born to lead him there. He would fly through space and time with his Shadow at his side, in front of him, behind him—it didn’t matter where she was, she would always be linked to him, always respond to him.
He woke up (teenage boys fall asleep with astonishing suddenness in the most unlikely situations) and saw her face above his, upside down. She was not thinking of herself, but of him, like Mary in a pietà. He felt a need to increase the distance, a sudden conviction that if there were more space between them, something worth having might grow.
That night he crept to her bedside and said, “Shadow. Shadow!”
“What?”
“I’m in love with you!”
“Go to sleep!”
Eight
His third year at UVA, Byrdie declared as his major an exotic conglomerate unknown in the history of The University or any other. He asked for an extra year to finish because he needed engineering credits. He saw his decision as the right and proper thing t
o do. It was planning that would save the world, not commerce. Economic growth driven by investment would exhaust Earth’s resources in a matter of years.
His theories were strongly influenced by the Kipling novel Captains Courageous, which he had found on a shelf at Lee’s parents’ house. A spoiled boy, heir to a railroad empire, learns the value of technological progress on a sailboat pursuing shoals of cod around the North Atlantic. Byrdie got to thinking: With today’s technology, the fishermen in the book could have hunted the cod to extinction. Cod now would be fabled creatures like the great auk. It was going to take clear-eyed young visionaries such as himself, powered by hereditary fortunes and thus immune to the forces of greed and speed, to pioneer the new antitechnology technologies that would restore helplessness and ineptitude to their rightful place as Tools for Conviviality (the Ivan Illich book had been Meg’s). For instance, a return to narrow, bumpy city streets with trolley tracks and bike lanes instead of parking would send quality of life through the roof. The elderly and handicapped could ride in the bike lanes on golf carts. Byrdie called his imaginary planning bureau “R&D,” for Regression and Deceleration or maybe Density. He had already drafted a scheme to eliminate the west end of Richmond entirely, integrating it with the desolate north side of downtown and doubling the density to achieve quality of life squared, and gotten an A-plus.
Lee’s fantasies of feudal power had always been confined to strict geographical limits. On further analysis he found them even more appealingly modest and humble. Had any Fleming ever aspired to anything more than to create a pleasing environment for himself and his friends? Had Flemings interfered in the lives of others since being knocked off their high horse at the close of the 1860s and/or 1960s? He thought Byrdie might be a clinical case. After all, the mother had been insane.
