“Do you need a thesaurus?” he asked, reached and pulled my robe back up around me. When I made no move at all, he retied my belt and then stepped back several feet. He waited, eyebrows still raised with the question. All of a sudden I felt kind of good, like I’d up and let all of this bad stuff out of me. I felt lifted, unburdened. I thought of what a thesaurus might say. “Fornicate you, you fornicated-up fornicator.”
He laughed.
“Copulate you.”
“Sure,” he said. I’m telling you that there are more pheromones to be found in one pore on that perfect face than Gerald could get if he was able to buy some at the Dollar Store. “Truce?” he asked then, and I nodded. I let him kiss my hand like I might have been the Queen Mother. Then he turned and told me he’d be back the next day to finish my shelves, that he’d be sure to knock first. Now maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it seems to me that he really lingered over kissing my hand. I think he was really attracted to me, and I wish you could talk, you old tape recorder, and give me some kind of opinion. I mean, would I be jumping right from the fire into the pan? I mean, I don’t even know this guy, and here I was getting all worked up, you know? I mean, I don’t know if that’s normal, and I wish I did, seeing as how I’m going into the business of what’s normal and what isn’t. Oh, but Lordy, it was something to behold.
I felt the pheromones resurrecting. Immediately, all over the room they were springing back, crying out Let me live, let me live! Let me do those things you said. And I think maybe he felt it too, because when he walked out into the yard he walked right through the sprinkler, held his arms out and let himself get a nice long spray before climbing into his truck and giving his dog a great big kiss. I would swear that he was looking up at my window as he pulled off, and I know that he’ll be back; he said he would. Now as a professional, I just don’t know what I’ll do about this. As a woman I have a few ideas. But for now I’ve got to go finish listening to Quee. Later when I talk to you, I’m going to tell all about some of my therapy techniques that I have developed; there’s the jigsaw test and the battery of tests I think of as the Flora and Fauna of the Mental Landscape. But tonight we are going to rehearse my future speech that will target the impotence that comes to many male smokers. She says she has worked weeks on the ceramic learning aids to illustrate what happens. Lord, these must be some dim bulbs I’m working with if they can’t imagine what a limp one might look like.
Part Two
Sometimes when Wallace Johnson takes his break in the afternoon, he angles himself so that he can watch the cars heading down Highway 211 to the beach, read a letter or two. It amazes him how he never gets tired of reading over the same words. It’s like when he was a boy and buying pulps. Maybe part of what keeps him reading is because it’s an unsolved mystery. During the twenty years since that first letter, this poor soul has lost her lover and then her husband; she’s had boyfriends, but nobody she really cares about. No family really. She’s one of those unfortunate ones who never really got to have a childhood. She was always working, always feeling responsible.
Now he turns his attention to the window where there is a steady gray mist. He’ll take tomorrow off and Saturday and then he’ll be right back at the crack of dawn on Sunday to start all over again. He doesn’t mind at all. Almost there, almost there, sometimes he hears the words in his cash register or in the rhythm of how he stamps the postage. Retirement. It equals fishing and reading and building the deck that Judy has talked about for years.
The land alongside the highway here is known as Lamb’s Folly, story being that old man Lamb built himself a huge beautiful ship, spent his whole life building it, only to then realize that there was no possible way to get it out of the clearing and to the sea without cutting down a forest of trees and all the homes that surrounded him. Old Lamb’s Folly. Who knew if it was true, but it sure made a good story. Every time he drove his family on this stretch, which was near about every weekend, he’d say, “Did I ever tell you the story of Lamb’s Folly?” And they’d all groan and moan and laugh. For years his sons begged him to take them up into the woods to search for the ship, but of course he didn’t. In his mind there was no touching it. It was as big as the Ark. It was as fancy as the QE II. It was a myth, a legend, the kind of thing you can pin a life on if the rest of the world will let you.
He stares out into the rain and wishes that he could see the woman of the letters there in her red scarf. He wishes that she could pick her way through Lamb’s Woods and that somewhere there, deep in the heart of it, she would stumble onto her Wayward One—that he wasn’t really dead at all. He was there in this lost and hidden city waiting for her, waiting for a new life to begin.
WINTERTIME 1970
Dear Wayward One,
It’s three o’clock in the morning and I have driven myself down here to the beach to be close to you. It’s kind of eerie as I sit here at the end of the pier, the light from a nearby post giving me just enough to see what I’m doing. There is no moon. I was hoping there would be. There is the occasional light from the Fort Caswell Lighthouse, that beacon searching the strand. As a young woman I was made to think it was searching for lost souls, calling the sinners over to a Baptist retreat, washing their stains with cold salt water. Now as I look down toward the point (I have a flashlight in my purse should I get up the nerve to walk down there) I keep expecting to see you there standing out on the top step. I guess you might know that the folks who own that house hate you for killing yourself there. I don’t anymore. Tonight as I bent down and kissed my husband I had the strange sensation that I was two people living two lives, at least two! I think I’m really like an old alley cat, a big old pussycat with one life blending right into the next. I feel like I have been everything, done everything. I guess the only thing I never was was a mother by nature, but don’t we all know that there are other ways to mother. There are mothers who have produced child after child in their stretched-out wombs; they have sweated and squeezed those muscles to push them out into the world and to someone like me it seems that would make a difference, that it would change them deep in their souls, but apparently not. My mother grew me in her body; I came headfirst from between her thighs and then where was she? WHERE? All those times I needed her there for me and WHERE? There I was at the Ocean Forest and to all the world didn’t I look fit? Didn’t I look like somebody with a good life? I went from being somebody who practically lived up under a house to being somebody with a step-daddy who took me to spend a whole summer there at Myrtle Beach. You said you remembered meeting him. Well, a lot of people probably do; he was something, all right. My mother thought he was God. I never got over wanting my own daddy, the one I could barely remember by then. I knew kind sad eyes and I knew the scent of bourbon though as a child I could not have described either to you. It was just my way of knowing something. It’s how I imagine people who have always been blind remember the world.
You know I thought you were God, for a time at least. I wanted you but then I also hated you for leaving behind a child who might grow up to feel just as I did about being left. I’ve seen your child playing ball over at the junior high and I think “Oh honey, you would hate me if you knew who I was. You would call me whore and witch.” But instead he looks at me and smiles and waves great big like all the children do. He is beautiful, too. Perfect. There’s a part of me that wants him. Not like you’re thinking! I mean want him. I wish he did love me the way a child loves its mother. I wonder if it could ever happen? Your wife waves to me that same way. She hasn’t a clue Dear Wayward One. I am sitting here looking for a sign I guess. I keep thinking that if there is something beyond this life, beyond my nine lives, that you’ll find it and of course I know that if you find it, you’ll let me know. I’ll find a seashell in my mailbox or I’ll find the rest of the note you were writing to me just before you died. Maybe I’ll find my red chiffon scarf tied around my bedpost and it will smell just like you. The last time I was here you were beside me and it was
at this same time of day. We weren’t worried. If somebody saw us, they wouldn’t know who we were, not at this hour, not here on the pier. This is a time and place for the serious fishermen, the ones who sometimes sleep here at the foot of the pier. The old men who know what they’re doing and the teenagers who dream of catching a shark and drinking liquor all night. That morning there was a moon and we sat with it to our right, the sky lightening on our left. It was almost a full moon and you talked about how even though you knew that there was a flag up there on it, and that men had landed and walked and taken close-up photos that appeared in Life magazine, you still felt complete magic when you looked at it. It had the power to take your world and shake it up, let the insignificant sift through like in those little plastic sieves the children play with at the beach; it still had the power to make you catch your breath and think how simple life should be. You wake and eat and sleep and love. Anything beyond this is unnecessary. I listened to you then. I believed your every brilliant word. I held your hand and stroked your fingers, pressed them to my cheek as you talked. We got corny then, remember? You said, “Here’s old blue eyes” and you sang “Paper Moon.”
It was near dawn when I snuck into my house and there in my dark pantry I slipped off my coat and pants and was just as I had been hours before: white cotton gown, barefooted. And when I slipped into bed, my side so cold, my husband moved in close to me like he might be guided by sonar, like the dolphins you were telling me about. He sensed life, heartbeats, blood flowing.
And now I have to do that again. Now I don’t even bother to hide my nightgown but wear it bunched up and stuck into my pants. I’m wearing my slippers. It’s strange but I still feel like I’m doing something wrong, like I’m committing some great sin, and when my husband rolls in close to me I’ll worry if he can tell that I’ve been with you. You, the invisible, the dead.
WALLACE KNEW WHICH pier she was talking about in this letter. He knew by the angle of the moon, by the beacon she described, and the direction of the point. He had gone many times, right after that letter came. Since then Hurricane Hugo has slapped the end of the old pier into the sea and it’s been rebuilt, the new wood golden blond and green next to what had remained. He had sat there at the end just as she had done, seen the world exactly as she had seen it. He felt compelled to call out to Wayward One in his own mind. Silently, in rhythm with the waves, the rolling pull and the whining give of the creosote pilings beneath him, he asked that if he was there, and if he could hear, that he please get in touch with that woman. “How could you do that to such a good woman?” he asked, a man who had enough sense to understand the power of the moon. And that was when Wallace began to wonder if everybody has a folly; if every life plan, no matter how carefully executed, doesn’t overlook some important part. And now, gently folding the letter back up and into its plastic bag he knows that that is true. Something or someone is always overlooked, and it’s only in looking back that it all comes clear.
When Robert Bobbin gets down to the Fulton police station, the first thing he does is pull the record assigned to him. His hands shake and his damp fingers leave smudges of ink. All of the guys are stalling before the day begins, doing what they do, which is pick on the newest guy, who happens to be a girl. “Did the department issue you those panty hose?” one guy asks and she turns around and shoots him the bird. She’s really kind of cute, pixie-looking, with short frosted hair and a skinny little body, and everybody at the Fulton Police Department is trying to match Robert up with her. Apparently she has heard the news, because she turns and smiles at him as he passes. It’s the first day to really feel like autumn, brisk wind and leaves flying, and she’s all wrapped up in a regulation jacket that’s way too big for her. She looks like some child playing school crossing guard, and he can’t help but be a little relieved for her to know that by noon it will be one of those Indian summer days where the heat of the sun is in full swing and she will need to shed the wool. It’s supposed to hit eighty later in the day, or so the weather guy said on the radio; he ended his segment with a silly jingle to the tune of Bill Bailey. Won’t you come home, Jones Jameson? People all over town are placing bets on where the asshole might be, and all Robert can think about is the jerk’s wife, a woman who surely doesn’t need to be mistreated. Robert nods quickly and goes into his little tiny cubicle of an office and begins reading the updated report:
Jones Jameson officially disappeared on August 27th when he told his wife he was driving to Raleigh for a Disc Jockey reunion. Wife said they had not been getting along but that “that was nothing new and everybody in town knew it.” The wife, Alicia Jameson, reported that he never telephoned her as he said he would. She said that it was not unusual for him to forget to call home on his first night somewhere, but that he almost always called by late on the second day, if for no other reason but to see if he had any messages. She said that whenever she telephoned him on past trips she was greeted by party sounds, or more often, just the sound of someone in the background. This time there was no record whatsoever of his arrival at the Holiday Inn in Raleigh. His parents also have not heard from him.
At this point in the police record, there was a break with a notation that Mrs. Jameson had broken down and cried. Robert wishes he had been the one to ask the questions, that he had been there to touch her shaking shoulder. The first time he ever saw Alicia Jameson, the attraction was so powerful it left him tongue-tied and spastic like he used to be and had been most of his life. She was beautiful in a serious, forlorn-looking way.
Robert reads on to find that Jones Jameson never showed up at the meeting in Raleigh (turns out there was no meeting). State troopers are looking for a gold Audi 5000. On the afternoon of August 30, the wife came in and filed a missing person report after having called that morning. When questioned about why she had waited, she repeated that he had stayed away from home often and she had no reason to believe that this time was any different from the others.
It is clear to Robert this is the first report the new girl has ever written. It just goes on and on, telling what everybody was wearing (Alicia wore a tight denim skirt above the knee and a black T-shirt). Then she has what she calls “an aside note,” such as “There was a big woman with Mrs. Jameson by the name of Quee Purdy. She is the wife’s employer and likened the missing party to an alley cat out to youknowwhat.” On past occasions Jones had stayed away for as long as two days without word. “Aside note: son of a bitch the big woman said and the wife agreed.” So does Robert. When asked why this time warranted a call to the PD, Alicia said that she grew suspicious when she started getting phone calls in the middle of the night from (she assumed) the girlfriend he had gone off to meet in the past. It was a woman’s voice but she was trying to sound like a man and she kept saying “Jones, please.” Finally, Alicia told the voice she had no earthly idea where Jones might be and then this voice called her a lying whore and hung up. In the report, “lying whore” was typed in caps and underlined. The aside note said: “Big woman says: ‘Lying whore my foot—well, if that ain’t the pot calling the kettle.’ ” Alicia called the department the very next morning with the encouragement of her employer, “the big woman: owner and operator of Smoke-Out Signals, a place for nicotine addicts to seek treatment.”
Alicia had brought a picture of Jones Jameson. It is the photo the radio station uses when he does a live show like at Tart’s TV or Brew-meister Palace (his most recent public appearances). The rest of the report is all about the asshole’s physical appearance, and the report is way too personal sounding for police records, but Bobbin isn’t going to be the one to take down that little crossing guard; she’ll figure it out.
The photo of the missing party shows a Caucasian male of age 40 with receding hairline. Hair is brown and buzzed close to the head. Head is somewhat elongated, some might say equine-like, and he also has prominent teeth to go along with above said description. He has big brown eyes which is why (wife said) he thinks he’s something. (Though it doesn’t sou
nd very good and though a person might hate to admit it, he is downright gorgeous like somebody who could pose on a Stud calendar if you happened to be somebody who likes that sort of thing which I’ll assure you Deputy Bobbin, I am not!) Wife also said that though you can’t see it in the picture, his body is his strong point. He is six feet one and two hundred pounds. He works out on a regular basis and has a lot of body hair. When asked if he had any special identification traits, wife turned bright red and looked down. Yes she said but did not continue. After several rounds of questions she finally admitted to his being “endowed” at which point the big woman accompanying the wife burst into such a fit of laughter that she had to be asked to leave the room. (I hesitate to put this in the report but it could prove to be valuable information I’d think.) The wife then continued by telling that on the day he left home, he was wearing what he was always wearing: khakis, a white, all-cotton Izod shirt open at the collar, a salmon colored alpaca sweater (his golfing sweater) tied around his waist, loafers, no socks, Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses and a madras belt that she had given him when they first started going out. The Jamesons have one child, a son Taylor who is two. Wife can be reached at any time at home and/or her place of employment: Smoke-Out Signals, a place for people trying to kick the habit.
“So? What did you think?” The new girl pops her head into Robert’s cubicle and points at the file on his desk, that asshole Jones Jameson looking up at him.
“About?”
“The report. My first report.” She steps into the room now and in the light from the window, without all the guys gawking, Robert sees that she’s right pretty, in a frail bleached-out way. She reminds him of somebody he used to have quite a thing for back when he worked in Marshboro and was the butt of everybody’s jokes. “Why are you staring at me?”
Carolina Moon Page 10
