Emporium

by Adam Johnson

  We hear another plane, faint and pitched, high in the bright haze above.

  “Smile for the birdie,” my mother says, but nobody looks.

  I cross my arms and turn toward the water. The straight-on sun gives an illusion of great depth, and for the first time I wonder what else is at the bottom of that lake.

  * * *

  Six hours later, we are again on the end of the dock, this time in lawn chairs, fishing for dinner. The sun shines low at our backs, casting our outlines on the water. The lowering tide is draining the marshes, drawing currents rich with shrimp, bait crabs, and fingerlings into our lake. This is the time when gar and specs swim up the river to hunt in fast schools. But we’re after redfish today, and Berlin has decided that light, temperature, and water-clarity all dictate the use of the simple gold spoon. Randy has joined us, and we cast flashing spoons in turn.

  To keep from crossing lines, we have established zones: Berlin casts to the left of the dock, near shore, at ten o’clock; Teeg casts at eleven; my mother fishes over Mrs. Teeg’s china at noon; I aim for one o’clock, while Randy must fish over the submerged slot machines we ended up dumping along his bank. The air holds the rotty smell of raw cane, and we drink Junior League tea, sweet enough to fur your teeth.

  Randy and I have our shoes off, our pants cuffed, so when I swing my legs, our feet brush. Randy keeps snagging his lure. He tugs his line all different directions.

  I’m afraid we’ll pull up some strange article of Mrs. Teeg’s, a brooch or brassiere she’s been missing out in California.

  “You say you’re from Kansas City?” Berlin asks Randy.

  “It’s Oklahoma.”

  “Certainly, Oklahoma City,” Berlin says. “Do much fishing in Oklahoma, son?”

  “I can’t say I got the opportunity.”

  Teeg asks, “So, what do they do for kicks in Oklahoma?”

  “Terrorism, sir.”

  “Oh, boy,” Teeg says and chuckles. “He’s good. This boy’s good.”

  “Don’t mind him,” I tell Randy. “He’s pretending he’s drunk for old times’ sake.”

  “You know what the problem with the ATF is?” Teeg asks Randy.

  Randy casts again, reels, pays great attention to the motion of his lure.

  Teeg says, “The problem with the ATF is they eat too much mustard.”

  Berlin laughs.

  “Boys,” my mother says. She lifts a hand for silence, then squints as she feels the fishing line between her fingers. She cocks her head, eyeing the tip of the rod, before jerking it back to set a hook in the first redfish of the day. I dig through the tackle until I find the balloons and begin blowing up a medium-sized red one.

  Berlin lands the fish and pays out six feet of line from his rod. Using the hole from the hook, he carefully feeds the line through the fish’s lip and knots it, so that the fish has a stretch of monofiliment tied to its mouth. On the other end of the line, I tie the balloon and we let the fish go.

  “What are you doing?” Randy asks.

  I look at him funny. “Fishing,” I tell him.

  The balloon wanders haphazard into open water until it falls in with the rhythm of its school, and we watch it slowly backcircle around the lake.

  There’s no use casting until the school heads our way. Berlin rattles the ice in his tea. Teeg whistles long and loud for Beau, calling him for the feast of fish guts ahead. I put my hand on Randy’s shoulder. He gives me this look, where, instead of shy, he looks older, like he’s not sure he wants to get caught up in me because I’m only sixteen, like he thinks I’m going to be a lot of work.

  When the balloon hunts its way around to the dock again, we know there are dozens of redfish, seventy or eighty, ghosting by under the surface. We all cast in volleys, the fish striking left and right.

  Randy loses a lure on the submerged slot machines. He has to cut his line.

  He’s a little offended at the ease with which we land fish, I can tell. He keeps swiveling his head when someone’s rod bends under a new weight. Every time a fish is netted and thumped with an oar, he shakes his head.

  “What the heck does my line keep snagging on?” he asks.

  “Don’t be a sorry sport,” I tell him.

  In ten minutes, we have a dozen fish in a five-gallon bucket. Berlin starts cleaning, while Teeg skins, scales flying everywhere like lost contact lenses. I help my mother fold chairs because it’s getting dark.

  Randy still holds his pole. He nods toward the lake, where a balloon skirts through the current. “What about that fish?”

  We all just look at him.

  * * *

  The next night, Saturday night, I stand in front of the mirror, upstairs, in my old bedroom. You can smell the old sheets, standing yellowy on the bed. On the walls hang my father’s worn-out flight maps—Cuba, Cayman, the Dominican Republic—places that captivated me when I was younger. In the mirror, my lips are Soft Chenille, my nails, Cosmopolitan-7.

  It’s past seven thirty and still no Randy. I know he never promised 100 percent to take me to the Sadie Hawkins’, and for about a 5 percent chance, I have been to my mother’s boutique in Lafayette, where homosexuals rubbed my scalp and conferred on how long my roots should burn. For maybe 10 percent, I let two Vietnamese women paint my toes, bought polka-dot stockings, and then doused myself—down my neck, along the backs of my arms—with Petit-Chou.

  Who knows if there will be a raid tomorrow. Downstairs, I hear my mother loading china into the trunk of her Lincoln for the trip to Aunt Clara’s, and from various rooms in the house come the sounds of Berlin opening all the old wood-frame windows and propping them up with dealers’ canes. I lift the folds of my black skirt and let them fall, watching the sheer silk return to my legs in the mirror. The truth is the side slits point to my hips. I undress, folding everything into a garment bag, and put on a jersey and jeans before going down into the garage to pull the cover off the Super Sport.

  Inside, the seats are soft as glycerin, the old leather smelling both sharp and sweet, like the limey mint of a julep. Clipped to the visor is a photo of my mother, young, in Germany, and next to that is the garage door remote, which makes me hear those birds again. I creep out of the garage on idle, and even though I’m just driving around to the front approach, you can feel the thumping pressure of the engine. The SS floats, hood raking, when I touch the gas.

  At our front landing, I back up to my mother’s Lincoln so the cars are parked trunk to trunk. She’s loading watercolor paintings into the backseat when I climb out. All her potted flowers have been pulled out onto the porch.

  “What am I going to do with these orchids?” she asks me, then realizes I’m in jeans. “Oh, honey, he’s not going to show, is he?”

  “Randy’s busy,” I say. “He’s got an important job.”

  Mom lifts her eyebrows. “Looks like you’ve picked up the fine art of making excuses for the shortcomings of men. From me, no doubt.”

  “Oh, don’t get heavy on me, Mom.”

  She throws up her hands, which is twice as bad as rolling your eyes, and we start loading up the Super Sport. As I stack cardboard boxes in the trunk, I realize they’re not filled with china but ordinary junk like cleaning supplies and closet hangers. Then there’s a whole crate of utensils from the kitchen, including a thing of ketchup and mustard.

  “Mom, there’ll probably be sauces at Clara’s. I mean, do we really need to take this stuff? It’s not like the ATF is coming here to grill burgers or anything.”

  “Would you just pack?” she asks. “Just trust me and pack?”

  Berlin comes down and sits on the front steps. His shirt cuffs are unbuttoned, and his hair is dripping wet from the sink, something he does when he has a headache. “I opened all the doors and windows,” he says, then runs his hands through his hair.

  “You drive the Lincoln,” she tells me. “Berlin will want to go in the SS, I’m sure.”

  There’s a few more boxes standing on the porch, but I can tell
Mom has lost her thirst for loading. Without any ceremony, they climb in the Super Sport, Dad sitting shotgun with a flower pot and a painting of a pink flock of roseate spoonbills.

  I stick my head in the window, tell Dad to lean the seat back and get some rest.

  “It’s no use,” he says. “I won’t sleep again tonight.”

  My mother looks like she is going to say something comforting to me because of Randy, and though I know this is how she feels, she only says, “Drive safe. See you at Clara’s.” She puts the car in gear, but every time she even touches the gas pedal, the car leaps forward, tires spinning, sending a shower of gravel onto our porch.

  “This car is simply inoperable,” I hear her say, lurching down our shale drive.

  When they’re gone, I sit behind the wheel of the ivory Continental and clunk it into gear. Though the sky is clear, the air smells of oak pollen and storm, so that lumbering down the drive, I have the urge to turn on the wipers. Instead, I adjust the rearview mirror, aiming it back at our house, which is black, with a deeper black standing in the open doors and windows, waiting for something big that may or may not come.

  I follow our weaving, tree-lined drive, and I know before I hit the parish road that I’m not going to aunt Clara’s just yet. I’m headed to the Black Bayou, to Randy’s oil-recovery vessel.

  Flying south a couple miles, I turn onto the Bayou Works road, and across the levee, I can see the silver ship, with its orange rafts and black booms, looking from here like it is parked in a grassy field. A group of oil companies pitched in to buy it in hopes of preventing a Valdez-like spill on the Gulf, but they can’t agree on a name or even a color to paint it. The ship sits silent under coats of galvanized primer, fixed to a mooring it has never left. Pulling up to the fence, I hit the high beams and honk.

  Randy comes to the gate wearing boots, a black tee, and khaki pants with black stripes down the sides. There’s a walkie-talkie in his back pocket. He pulls out a ring of keys and starts trying them, one-by-one, in the gate’s padlock.

  I hang my fingers in the chain link and look at him.

  “They’re serving a search warrant on my house tomorrow.”

  Randy pauses, a key about to enter the lock. “Who is?”

  “Who? Who do you think? BATF.”

  “What for?” he asks.

  “It’s a long story. Did you know about it? I mean, are you going to be there?”

  “Serving warrants is serious business—there’s site containment, infra red, metal detection teams, void sweeps. They don’t let me near that, and I don’t really hear any news. Who the hell am I? I can’t even pass my entrance test.”

  I hold his eyes. I get a feeling from him. I suppose I’ve always felt it, that he has no secrets, that I can believe him. “There went your one excuse for standing me up.”

  “Come on,” he says, popping the lock. He shakes open the gate.

  There’s a huge concrete dock with a yellow-striped helipad. At the edge of the deck, an anhinga dries its wings under the floodlights.

  On the gangway, I stop him. “So tell me why you blew me off.”

  “I had to work. I told you I’d probably have to work.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? I have a job. What if there was a spill? Who’d open the gates? Who’d turn on the deck lights for the helicopters? Someone has to prime the tanks for the recovery crews.”

  “You should have called.”

  “What would I have said?” he asks. “You only hear what you want, anyway.”

  He turns and walks up the stairs. It takes me a moment, but I follow him, climbing behind, up four flights of grating. We enter the bridge, a dark, angled room filled with tall chairs that have shock absorbers and shoulder harnesses. Looking through the windscreen, you can’t see anything. It’s like being up in the Custer, flying out past the oil platforms, where there are no landmarks and the dark of the sky and the dark of the sea are one. This view has the same spookiness as flying in a dream, when you don’t know what’s keeping you afloat or how long it will last.

  Randy flips all the equipment on and mans the console’s island, where a Raytheon radar screen warms up and then ticks out a green-and-blue map, showing everything from the Intracoastal towers to the humped blips of the Sabine power station, thirty-five miles away.

  Randy explains how radar works, and I listen, as if I didn’t grow up around it.

  There is a button-tipped joystick on the console, and Randy turns it on. Somewhere atop the boat a searchlight ignites, and it is like nothing I’ve seen. Through the windscreen, we suddenly see marshlands unfurl toward open water, while cloud banks drag their asses along glades of sawgrass and cane.

  “This thing’s made by Boeing,” he says.

  The light is bright enough to leave insects stunned and turn mist into steam, so that the beam is like a smoky tube extending to the horizon. Randy hands me a pair of pale yellow binoculars, and I follow as he trains the beam on a skiff, far in the distance. On the small boat, deep in the marsh grass, I make out a man with a police flashlight and a compound bow, poaching alligators in the dark.

  “He’s out there every night,” Randy says. “I call Fish and Game, but by the time they get out here, he’s gone. That’s an endangered species, you know.”

  He aims the light west, pointing it toward Texas. “There’s the city of Vidor, world Ku Klux Klan headquarters. And here’s Toomey, dog fights, hate crimes, waterway piracy, and nine unsolved murders this year, a per-capita record, even for Louisiana.”

  Sitting on the edge of the panel, Randy works the joystick, and as he swivels the light to bear on another target, the beam flashes past a shotgun shack built on stilts along the banks of the Black Bayou. It’s the kind of place Mom and I had to live in when I was a girl, during Berlin’s first year in Germany. I don’t remember that time really—we stayed there a while, then money started coming in the mail, and we moved.

  Randy’s free arm swings around my shoulders, so that he can better point by guiding my line of sight down his finger. Then he shifts the light toward an orange dome on the horizon. “That’s Beaumont, rape capital of America. You ever want to get raped, just go to Beaumont.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” I tell him, but my mind’s on that shotgun shack, how my Mom and I lived out of boxes in a place just like it when my father went away, and it seemed like he was never coming back.

  “It’s a dangerous world out there,” Randy tells me. “Did you know strange black airplanes fly around here at night? Then there’s Port Arthur, home of Janis Joplin. Three tons of ammoniumphosphate fertilizer went missing there last week, and—”

  I take the joystick from Randy, interrupting him, and I point the light back on the little shack. I’m not thinking about lawyers and lawsuits and warrants, but those bottles of ketchup and mustard. That’s the kind of thing you pack when you’re moving into a little house on stilts, when you’ll never see your old house again.

  “If you point the light that way,” Randy says. “You’ll see—”

  “Shh,” I tell him and study the house, its dangling clothesline, the rusty fish stringer on the rail. This is where normal people live, I think—vinyl siding, propane tanks. Then suddenly, a young couple stumbles out onto the porch. A man, wearing only sweatpants, stands sideways in the light, his hair sleep-wild and glowing, and the light’s bright enough to show through the bedclothes of the young woman with him.

  Randy flips a toggle, and the beam shuts down. In the dark, he lifts his hands.

  “There you go,” he says. “That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. You go and do something crazy like scare those people out of their bed, and you wonder why nobody asks you to the dance. They probably think we’re aliens.”

  I can hear Randy, but the afterglow in my eyes only lets me see that girl, forearm braced against the light. That’s when I lean over and flip the spotlight on again. I am an alien from outer space, and I’ve come to ab
duct her boyfriend, occupy her house, and if I feel like it, maybe even point my disappearing ray at her. It could be all three, and the only thing this earthling can do is wince in the light, hand high like a stop sign.

  THE HISTORY OF CANCER

  It was the year we saw bathroom tile as a form of divination. Sparkling, hard, it held all our answers. My friend Ralph’s father came home in the early evenings, covered with white plaster, and it was our job to haul the tile out of his truck and take it out back. He never made it easy on us. The tile was hidden under junk in five-gallon buckets or stuffed in all the drawers of his toolbox. He had a huge lunch cooler with his name spelled on the side—FORST—in black electrical tape, and you never knew what to expect: it could weigh sixty pounds with stolen tile or be light as orange peels. He pulled that cooler from the cab and walked up the drive, swinging it, while Ralph and I took bets as to whether or not it would drop us to the ground when he handed it over, whether it would take both of us to drag it around back.

  Forst had built a tile bin in the backyard out of old planking and sagged plywood, though to us it was a tile palace, with its long rows of shelves spilling with ceramics, great heaps of porcelain so high you had to climb over on all fours. Here we separated the tiles into mason’s boxes and old grout buckets as we sat on upturned caulking crates and discussed what a man could do with all that tile. It was clear this tile, smooth in our hands, was worth a great deal, and this was a lifetime’s worth, enough to wall a gymnasium, though in a hundred different colors. The tile palace was also the place Forst kept his magazines.

  Here’s where the art came in. To separate tile by color—pink, tan, powder blue—was one thing, and separating by shape—rectangle, hexagram, star-and-diamond—was another, but we separated by kind as well: inner corners, coping edges, facing plates, running trim. No stack of tile was too small in our eyes, and on the back of a shelf alone might be set four, yellow, rectangular elbows. Once in a while, there would be a lone tile. I had a golden-speckled round tile that I carried in my back pocket all summer, and in its burnished finish I could nearly picture the family’s house where this tile matched, could almost imagine a house in which there were no odd pieces left over at all.