At the foot of Seminary I stopped to look at a Czech marine diesel being lowered into a homemade trap boat on a chain fall. It was stolen from Cuban nationals, who get nice engines from the Reds. The police four-wheel drifted around the corner aiming riot guns my way. Getting decency these days is like pulling teeth. Once the car was under control and stopped, two familiar officers, Nylon Pinder and Platt, put me up against the work shed for search.
“Drive much?” I asked.
“Alla damn time,” said Platt.
“Why work for Peavey?” I asked.
Platt said, “He’s a pillar of our society. When are you gonna learn the ropes?”
Nylon Pinder said, “He don’t have the gun on him.”
Platt wanted to know, “What you want with the .38 Smith?”
“It’s for Peavey’s brain pan. I want him to see the light. He’s a bad man.”
“Never register a gun you mean to use. Get a cold piece. Peavey’s a pillar of our society.”
“Platt said that.”
“Shut up, you. He’s a pillar of our society and you’re a depraved pervert.”
“Peavey said that.”
“Nylon said for you to shut your hole, misfit.”
“I said that, I said ‘misfit.’”
Platt did something sudden to my face. There was blood. I pulled out my bridge so if I got trounced I wouldn’t swallow it. Platt said, “Look at that, will you.”
I worked my way around the Czech diesel. They were going to leave me alone now. “Platt,” I said, “when you off?”
“Saturdays. You can find me at Rest Beach.”
“Depraved pervert,” said Nylon, moving only his lips in that vast face. “Get some teeth,” he said. “You look like an asshole.”
The two of them sauntered away. I toyed with the notion of filling their mouths with a couple of handfuls of bees, splitting their noses, pushing small live barracudas up their asses. The mechanic on the chain fall said, “What did they want with you? Your nose is bleeding.”
“I’m notorious,” I said. “I’m cheating society and many of my teeth are gone. Five minutes ago I was young. You saw me! What is this? I’ve given my all and this is the thanks I get. If Jesse James had been here, he wouldn’t have let them do that.”
The mechanic stared at me and said, “Right.”
I hiked to my stepmother’s, to Roxy’s. I stood like a druid in her doorway and refused to enter. “You and your Peavey,” I said. “I can’t touch my face.”
“Throbs?”
“You and your god damn Peavey.”
“He won’t see me any more. He says you’ve made it impossible. I ought to kill you. But your father will be here soon and he’ll straighten you out.”
“Peavey buckled, did he? I don’t believe that. He’ll be back. —And my father is dead.”
“Won’t see me any more. Peavey meant something and now he’s gone. He called me his tulip.”
“His…?”
“You heard me.”
I gazed at Roxy. She looked like a circus performer who had been shot from the cannon one too many times.
In family arguments, things are said which are so heated and so immediate as to seem injuries which could never last; but which in fact are never forgotten. Now nothing is left of my family except two uncles and this tattered stepmother who technically died; nevertheless, I can trace myself through her to those ghosts, those soaring, idiot forebears with their accusations, and their steady signal that, whatever I thought I was, I was not the real thing. We had all said terrible things to each other, added insult to injury. My father had very carefully taken me apart and thrown the pieces away. And now his representatives expected me to acknowledge his continued existence.
So, you might ask, why have anything to do with Roxy? I don’t know. It could be that after the anonymity of my fields of glory, coming back had to be something better than a lot of numinous locations, the house, the convent school, Catherine. Maybe not Catherine. Apart from my own compulsions, which have applied to as little as the open road, I don’t know what she has to do with the price of beans … I thought I’d try it anyway. Catherine. Roxy looked inside me.
“Well, you be a good boy and butt out. Somehow, occupy yourself. We can’t endlessly excuse you because you’re recuperating. I died and got less attention. Then, I was never an overnight sensation.”
I went home and fed the dog, this loving speckled friend who after seven trying years in my life has never been named. The dog. She eats very little and stares at the waves. She kills a lizard; then, overcome with remorse, tips over in the palm shadows for a troubled snooze.
* * *
Catherine stuck it out for a while. She stayed with me at the Sherry-Netherland and was in the audience when I crawled out of the ass of a frozen elephant and fought a duel in my underwear with a baseball batting practice machine. She looked after my wounds. She didn’t quit until late. There was no third party in question.
* * *
I could throw a portion of my body under a passing automobile in front of Catherine’s house. A rescue would be necessary. Catherine running toward me resting on my elbows, my crushed legs on the pavement between us. All is forgiven. I’ll be okay. I’ll learn to remember. We’ll be happy together.
* * *
I had a small sharpie sailboat which I built with my own hands in an earlier life and which I kept behind the A&B Lobster House next to the old cable schooner. I did a handsome job on this boat if I do say so; and she has survived both my intermediate career and neglect. I put her together like a fiddle, with longleaf pine and white-oak frames, fastened with bronze. She has a rabbeted chine and I let the centerboard trunk directly into the keel, which was tapered at both ends. Cutting those changing bevels in hard pine and oak took enormous concentration and drugs; not the least problem was in knowing ahead of time that it would be handy to have something I had made still floating when my life fell apart years later.
She had no engine and I had to row her in and out of the basin. When the wind dropped, I’d just let the canvas slat around while I hung over the transom staring down the light shafts into the depths. Then when it piped up, she’d trim herself and I’d slip around to the tiller and take things in hand. Sailboats were never used in the Missouri border fighting.
I went out today because my nose hurt from Peavey’s goons and because I was up against my collapse; and because Catherine wouldn’t see me. My hopes were that the last was the pain of vanity. It would be reassuring to think that my ego was sufficiently intact as to sustain injury; but I couldn’t bank that yet.
The wind was coming right out of the southeast fresh, maybe eight or ten knots, and I rowed just clear of the jetty and ran up the sails, cleated off the jib, sat back next to the tiller, pointed her up as good as I could, and jammed it right in close to the shrimp boats before I came about and tacked out of the basin. I stayed on that tack until I passed two iron wrecks and came about again. The sharpie is so shoal I could take off cross-country toward the Bay Keys without fear of going aground. I trimmed her with the sail, hands off the tiller, cleated the main sheet, and turned on some Cuban radio. I put my feet up and went half asleep and let the faces parade past.
Immediately east of the Pearl Basin, I found a couple shivering on a sailboard they had rented at the beach. He was wearing a football jersey over long nylon surfing trunks; and she wore a homemade bikini knotted on her brown, rectilineal hips. What healthy people! They had formed a couple and rented a sailboard. They had clean shy smiles, and though they may not have known their asses from a hole in the ground in terms of a personal philosophy, they seemed better off for it, happier, even readier for life and death than me with my ceremonious hours of thought and unparalleled acceleration of experience.
I rigged the board so that it could be sailed again, standing expertly to the lee of them with my sail luffing. I told them they were ready to continue their voyage and she said to the boy, “Hal, it’s a bummer, I�
��m freezing.” And Hal asked me if she could ride back in my boat because it was drier. I told them I’d be sailing for a while, that I had come out to think, that I was bad company, and that my father had died in the subways of Boston. They said that was okay, that she would be quiet and not bother me. I let her come aboard, politely concealing my disappointment; then shoved Hal off astern. He was soon underway, with his plastic sailboard spanking on the chop, the bright cigarette advertisement on his sail rippling against the blue sky.
I continued toward the Bay Keys while the girl watched me with cold gray eyes, the shadow of the sail crossing her slowly at each tack. Then she went forward and took the sun with her hands behind her head.
“Your boyfriend a football player?” I asked.
“No, he deals coke.”
“I see.”
“Do you like coke?”
“Yes, quite a lot.”
“Well, Hal has some Bolivian rock you can read your fortune in, I’ll tell you that.”
“Oh, gee, I—”
“Anybody ever tell you the difference between acid and coke?”
“Nobody ever did.”
“Well, with acid you think you see God. With coke you think you are God. I’ll tell you the honest truth, this rock Hal’s got looks like the main exhibit at the Arizona Rock and Gem Show. Did you ever hear a drawl like mine?”
“No, where’s it from?”
“It’s not from anywhere. I made the god damn thing up out of magazines.”
“How much of that rock is left?”
“One o.z. No more, no less. At a grand, it’s the last nickel bargain in Florida.”
“I’ll take it all.”
“We’ll drop it off. Hey, can you tell me one thing, how come you got hospitalized? The papers said exhaustion but I don’t believe everything I read. You don’t look exhausted.”
“It was exhaustion.”
That night, after I had paid them, I asked if the business in the boats that afternoon had been a setup. She said that it had. “Don’t tell him that!” giggled the boyfriend. “You coo-coo brain!”
* * *
My eyes were out on wires and I was grinding my teeth. When I chopped that shit, it fell apart like a dog biscuit. Bolivian rock. I didn’t care. I just made the rails about eight feet and blew myself a daydream with a McDonald’s straw. Let them try and stop me now!
By the time I got to Reynolds Street I was in tears. I went down to the park and crossed over to Astro City. The ground was beaten gray and flat and the tin rocketships were unoccupied. I climbed high enough on the monkey bars that no one could look into my eyes and wept until I choked.
I considered changing my name and cutting my throat. I considered taking measures. I decided to walk to Catherine’s house again and if necessary nail myself to her door. I was up for the whole shooting match.
I walked over to Simonton, past the old cigar factory, around the schoolyard and synagogue, and stopped at the lumber company. I bought a hammer and four nails. Then I continued on my way. On Eaton Street, trying to sneak, I dropped about a gram on the sidewalk. I knelt with my red and white straw and snorted it off the concrete while horrified pedestrians filed around me. “It takes toot to tango,” I explained. Nylon and Platt would love to catch me at this, a real chance to throw the book. I walked on, rubbing a little freeze on my gums and waiting for the drip to start down my throat and signal the advent of white-line fever or renewed confidence.
The wind floated gently into my hair, full of the ocean and maritime sundries from the shipyard. A seagull rocketed all the way from William Street close to the wooden houses, unseen, mind you, by any eyes but mine. A huge old tamarind dropped scented moisture into the evening in trailing veils. Mad fuck-ups running to their newspapers and greasy dinners surged around my cut-rate beneficence. I felt my angel wings unfold. More than that you can’t ask for.
Catherine’s house with her bicycle on the porch was in a row of wooden cigarmakers’ houses grown about with untended vegetation, on a street full of huge mahoganies. I thought to offer her a number of things—silence, love, friendship, departure, a hot beef injection, shining secrets, a tit for a tat, courtesy, a sensible house pet, a raison d’être, or a cup of coffee. And I was open to suggestion, short of “get outa here,” in which case I had the hammer and nails and would nail myself to her door like a summons.
I crossed the street to her house, crept Indian style onto the porch, and looked through the front window. Catherine was asleep on the couch in her shorts and I thought my heart would stop. I studied her from this luxurious point, staring at the wildly curly hair on her bare back; her arm hung down and her fingertips just rested on the floor next to a crammed ashtray. I had the nails in my shirt pocket, the hammer in the top of my pants like Jesse James’s Colt.
“Catherine,” I said, “you let me in.” This handsome woman, whom Peavey had once had the nerve to call my common-law wife, was suddenly on her feet, walking toward me with jiggling breasts, to ram down the front window and bolt the door. Then she went upstairs and out of sight. I called her name a couple of more times, got no answer, and nailed my left hand to the door with Jesse’s Colt.
2
THE SILVER ROOFS extended from my window in a fractured line under a sky which displayed a small but ineffably shiny cloud to the west. The radio was playing “Volare” by Dean Martin, the notorious companion of Frank Sinatra.
Catherine, bless her heart maybe, Catherine pried me from the door and put me in the guest room. Then she had Doctor Proctor come over and load me good on some intravenous downer. At first I thought I had passed into the great beyond. I thought quite objectively about the dead. They are given so much credit; when, in fact, they don’t know much of anything. And why should they? They have enough to do.
I’m busy too. I’m still alive and I’m not ashamed of it. I’m proud of this raiment. Bring on the ghosts. I’ll pack them through the streets. Let the ones who have ringed the city, who have made our lives an encampment, let them whiten the air, the sea. I happen to have enough to do already. Let the dead run a grocery store or build an airplane. I am not impressed with them, with the possible exception of my brother Jim. And having to argue as to whether my father is actually dead deprives the whole question of its dignity.
In the photograph of my mother’s funeral party, I am the third mourner from the left. I am wearing a Countess Mara tie, older than me, whose blue flowers arise like ghosts toward my throat. It is widely presumed that the expression on my face is a raffish grin; whereas it is plainly the grimace of gastric distress.
In the foreground of the picture, my aunts carry on their bulbous flirtation with the photographer. The picture is covered with the somnolent stains of handling by interested parties who believed me to have been grinning.
By noontime, Catherine had not come home and I had suffered a whiteout, a silence, a space between the echoes of the dead I had trifled with; and I felt prefigured in the vacancy, as though my future inhered there.
My hand was bandaged, I had evidently passed out and hung from the nail until discovered. The muscles in my arm were sore and stretched. From dangling.
I was falling asleep again when I heard Catherine arrive with someone, unloading groceries in front. Then she and the other person, another young woman, came and sat on the bed and looked at me. I pretended to be asleep.
“He’s still out of it,” said the other woman.
“This is Marcelline,” said Catherine.
“How did you know I was awake?”
“I can read you like a Dell comic.”
“How do you do, Marcelline.”
“Marcelline has just had an abortion.”
“I wasn’t making a pass at her, Catherine.”
Marcelline said, “If I roll a J will you all smoke on it with me?” I told her that stuff was cluttering up the drug scene and that I was opposed to its use.
“Who gave you the abortion?” I asked. All I wanted was to talk to
Catherine.
“A laughing nurse in New Orleans. A real card. I had to change planes in Tampa.”
“Marcelline loves Tampa,” Catherine said.
“They make a nice cigar there,” I offered.
“How’s your hand?”
“Hurts a lot.”
“You had a nail in it,” said Catherine.
Marcelline said, “A little crucifixion. What a droll guy. I hear you can’t remember anything. You’re full of little tricks.”
“Used to be he just talked funny,” said Catherine, “now he’s commenced acting it out.”
Marcelline said, “Tampa is full of elderly nice persons who know they could eat it any minute. So they don’t talk nuts to get laughs. My, it hurts. That nurse just got in there and rambled.”
I looked at Catherine with her berserk mass of kinks and curls. I thought, it didn’t matter about men; but when push came to shove, these Southern girls only wanted to see each other. I didn’t know what I was, not a Southerner certainly. A Floridian. Drugs, alligators, macadam, the sea, sticky sex, laughter, and sudden death. Catherine initiated the idea that I was a misfit. I took to the idea like a duck to water.
I felt sleepy again. I heard a sprinkler start up, the first drops of water falling on the ground with distinct thuds. I heard the voice of my odious grandfather twenty years ago, “There’s a nigger fishing the canal and he’s got one on!” My hands were knit together and I was wonderfully happy and comfortable drifting away with the two pretty women chatting on the end of the bed, about Tampa, about the difficulty of getting nice cotton things any more, about Wallace Stevens in Key West.
When I woke up a few minutes later, Marcelline was kissing Catherine. One of Catherine’s little breasts was outside her shirt and her panties were stretched between her knees. Marcelline slid the green skirt over Catherine’s stomach and bottom, then put it up under her. Catherine lifted one leg free of the panties in a gesture that put her leg out of the shadow the bed was in, into the sunlight. Marcelline slipped away and stayed until I heard the familiar tremolo of Catherine.
Panama Page 2
