“Now just glide with me when I move,” I said. “I’m going to lead with my right foot and follow with my left. We take one step this way.” We took the step that way, stiffly, like automatons. “Then another. Then I angle off a bit and take one step back. I learned how to do this in junior high school. It’s served me well for over fifty years.”
I could have kicked myself for reminding her how old I was.
The jetty lay like a titan’s vertebrae half-buried in the sand, pitted and uneven and altogether not an ideal surface for what we were about. Nevertheless, she began to get the hang of moving with me, began to loosen up, and I held her close and as tightly as I dared and got dizzy on her scent. After a minute or so of that, I said, “Song’s almost over.” It was “Sleepy Lagoon.” “We’re going to end with a dip.”
“What’s aieep!”
“See?”
She was laughing and lost track of her feet and almost fell. I steadied her and didn’t give her a chance to slip out of my arms, or to think about doing it. I’d picked these tracks and known what I was about when I picked them. Billie Holiday started singing “You’re My Thrill,” a performance that could raise goose pimples on a corpse. Vick made a sound like ooh. Then came an instrumental version of “Where or When” by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra; Paul Gonsalves’s vaporous saxophone enfolded us. Behind us, somebody said, “Yo. Fred and Ginger. Want a drink?”
It was Cardwell, feet planted wide, face beatific in the moonlight. He held up a silver flask and offered us the screw-on cup. It looked like a thimble among his thick fingers. We gave him a smart little bit of applause, and I said, “Bravo, Doctor Cardwell!”
Vick asked him, “Who’re Fred and Ginger?”
“Don’t mind him,” I said, “he’s living in the past.”
Cardwell, who was almost my age, snorted like a happy bull. “We’re all living in the past!”
We sat down on the end of the jetty and proceeded to get pretty silly together. She was between us, and at some point she slipped her arms around our necks and gave us a squeeze. We talked about trilobites and about nothing in particular, or didn’t talk at all but listened to “Happiness is a Thing Called Joe” and “Blue Flame” by Woody Herman, “Body and Soul” by Benny Goodman, “Lover Man” by Holiday. We took turns dozing. It finally worked out, just at dawn, that Cardwell was dozing and Vick and I were watching the sea lighten and the night retreat to the west. She looked sleepy and content, past being drunk but still short of hungover. There was a small dab of mud on her neck. I brushed it away and said, “Doctor Harris.”
She said, “Mister Barnett.”
“How come both of us’ve been here as long as we have, and I’ve only recently realized what a swell person you are?”
A smile spread across her face. “You’re slow.”
Kiss her, moron, I told myself.
And at that very moment, King came scrambling up the side of the jetty like the evil monkey he was and dropped into a squat before us. I heard the headheld’s faint whir and saw its eye seek Vick’s face. I couldn’t tell from her expression whether she, too, was conscious of having been interrupted at a crucial moment. “All I can say,” he said, “is, wow!” Mister Articulate. Someone on the beach hallooed and called him to breakfast by name. Somehow, he was still one of the guys. It eluded me.
Not everyone had stayed up drinking for nights running, or was old, so not everyone at breakfast felt entirely as washed out as I did. I wanted to hang around, to head King off at the pass if the need arose, but started to nod and almost face-dived into my food. I bade Vick as gallant a farewell as I was able without being a total clown and hobbled achingly off to my cot. The snoring hillock on the next cot was Cardwell; he had almost the same beatific look on his face. Jank, in skivvies, sat in a camp chair and scratched his pectorals. He nodded at a scrap of paper on my cot. “That came in from Sparks a couple minutes ago.”
I carefully sat down on the cot. “You wouldn’t have any hair of the dog, would you?”
He looked around blearily. “Is it after noon yet?”
I looked at the writing on the paper. Call me. Ruth. “Later,” I said, and became unconscious.
Which was a mistake, because by the time I regained consciousness, Ruth, who was not someone who liked to be kept waiting, had had time to put a fine vindictive edge on her plans for me. Another mistake was concluding my account of King’s impromptu beach holiday by telling her that he seemed well on the way to carving out a secure niche for himself in the camp and I therefore ought to be relieved of all responsibility for him. She agreed. Then, in as sweet-Southern-sexy a voice as though she were telling me to go ahead, pick something out of the Kama Sutra, she added, “This will allow you to devote your time to your other guest, Ms. Duvall, when you get back to the ship tonight.” I sputtered, protested, tried to argue. She wouldn’t argue. “Just make sure you’re with Hirsch when she comes back,” she said, “bye, hon,” and signed off.
I spent some time complaining to anybody who would listen, but hardly anybody could listen. Everyone had work to do. Toward sundown, however—by which time I was well past disbelief and outrage and clear to the sullen cranks—Jank showed up at the tent to watch me toss my meager gear into my threadbare seabag and listen to me damn Ruth. When I had exhausted her as a subject, I started in on King, whom I likened, in swift succession, to a burr under my saddle, a thorn in my side, and sand in my undershorts. Jank burst out laughing.
My surprise and pain at his unsympathetic reaction showed. He said, “Sorry. Don’t mean to make light.”
“Keep an eye on Mister Smarm while I’m off the beach, okay? Don’t let him work his bolt too much.” I closed the bag and looked around. “Are you all the send-off I’m getting?”
“It’s not like you’re going back, Kev.”
“I don’t suppose you know where Vick’s got to.”
“Off checking specimens with Cardwell, where else?”
We didn’t shake hands. It wasn’t as though I were going back. We separated outside the tent, and I walked disconsolately through the camp. There were voices in Rubenstein’s tent: the poker game was gearing up. At the end of the jetty, I found Hirsch fiddling around in the boat. We exchanged nods, and I was about to get in when I heard my name called. I turned to see three people coming along the jetty, Vick and Cardwell dressed in hideous Hawaiian shirts—both his; there was sufficient material in the one Vick wore for five or six dresses in her size—and King tagging along, duded up as usual. He hung back as they approached the boat. Vick hugged me warmly, gave me a quick kiss on the corner of the mouth, and said, “Sorry we didn’t get to see much of you today.”
“Well, you have a day job.”
“I just wanted to make sure you knew I had a wonderful time last night.”
“Cardwell supplied the trilobites and the booze.”
Cardwell sighed like an old steam engine and said, “I just catered. You guys danced.” He handed me some old-fashioned letters, written on paper, sealed in envelopes with names and addresses inscribed on them in ink. “Didn’t get these into the mail pouch in time.”
“No problemo.”
I stepped away, stepped down into the boat. King had got it all with the headheld. The boat pulled away from the jetty. Luminous in the golden light of evening, Vick and Cardwell waved to me, and I to them, and as far as I was concerned at that moment the only way the scene could have been improved—short, of course, of a last-minute reprieve for me and the simultaneous annihilation by lightning of Rick King—would have been for Cardwell to strum on a ukelele and Vick in a grass skirt to call out aloha oe while Bing Crosby crooned, Soon I’ll be sailing.…
Back on the ship, I pointedly did not report immediately to Ruth. I unpacked, showered to sluice off beach grit and thwarted hopes, stretched out on my bunk, with an anthology of essays plugged into the machine so I wouldn’t look just like some old bum taking a nap, and took a nap. I was awakened by the ship’s getting under way and lay staring up at t
he major decorative touch in my little compartment.
It was a framed reproduction, given to me as a birthday present by my third wife shortly before she called me a bastard and threw the cat at my head, of a map of mid-Paleozoic North America as it had been reconstructed by Charles Schuchert and other early-twentieth-century, pre-plate-tectonics paleogeographers. They had, among other things, rather seriously underestimated the extent of continental inundation and postulated persistent borderlands separated by seaways. I’d always been drawn to the region labeled Llanoria (Mexia), comprising what I regarded as home territory, northeastern Mexico, southern and southeastern Texas, Louisiana, bits of Oklahoma and Arkansas. Disappointingly, where Schuchert had postulated land, later, better-equipped geologists had found evidence only of muddy sea bottom. Yet I remained charmed by Llanoria and the other strangely shaped, exotically named land masses, Laurentia (Canadia), Cordillera (Cascadia), Appalachia, enclosing an inland sea studded with lesser lands, Siouia, Wisconsin Isle, Adirondack Island. I think the reason for the enduring appeal of this outmoded representation was that Schuchert and his colleagues must have approached their task not simply with the idea in mind of mapping a prehistoric continent according to the data available, but also with something like the pleasure Frank Baum and Edgar Rice Burroughs derived from filling in their maps of Oz and Barsoom.
I went to the mess and glumly ate. Then I sat thinking that I really ought to go see Ruth. Then I sat thinking that I really ought to go visit Chamberlain on the fantail, and wondered what I should say to him about Vick, and concluded that I didn’t feel like being disapproved of by a solitary drunk who hadn’t been involved with a woman since the Treaty of Ghent, who hadn’t even been ashore in all the years he’d spent here. Then I went to see Ruth, who while waiting for me had thought up all sorts of little jobs for me to do.
The days dragged into a week. Claire Duvall got shakily back on her feet. I took her on brief tours, introduced her to various people, and disliked her a lot. She was attractive in her way, with eyes so blue they were almost violet and hair so black it was almost blue, like a comic-book character’s, but I found her irritating company. All she could talk about was what a genius Rick was.
Ruth informed me that other newcomers, “important ones”—suits, in short—would soon be arriving, too, and maybe I should become the official greeter after all, since I was so good at it, and this was definitely the time to upgrade my wardrobe. I looked landward and burned with the torments of the damned. I couldn’t even get a personal message to shore—Sparks regretfully informed me that radio traffic was at an all-time high, ail day every day the air crackled with messages, either highly technical or else coded, from the interior. I was miserable enough to wonder if Ruth had somehow heard something about Vick and me, was keeping me on the ship and off the air out of spite, and more nonsense in that vein. The wasichu, those unsociable, obscurely specialized personnel who were taking over the expedition, continued to arrive and depart by helicopter, mysteriously, sinisterly. The suits didn’t come and didn’t come and didn’t come.
On the afternoon of the eighth day, there was a knock, and Chamberlain appeared in the hatchway, flask in hand. He said, “I got tired of waiting for you to come visit me.” He gave me a closer look. “You sulking alone in here, or you want someone to get you good and drunk and listen to your tale of woe.”
“I’m in no mood to be made fun of.”
“Oh, come on.” He was looking around for a place to sit. I moved a box of book chips, and he plopped himself down with a grunt. “Can I smoke?”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
He heaved a sigh that was almost a whimper, fidgeted, remembered the flask. “Want a drink?”
I took a long swallow and handed the flask back to him. “I drink too much.”
“Right now, you look like you can’t drink enough.”
“I’m about six minutes from going on a killing spree.”
“Hm.” He took a drink, stowed the flask, put his hands on his knees. “Our tail is tied in a knot today.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Welty, Eudora Welty, said that, whatever wonderful things we may do, fly to the moon, whatever—travel through time—we’re driven by a small range of feelings. She said all our motives can still be counted on our fingers.”
“You got that out of one of my books!”
“It matter where I got it if it’s true?”
I regarded him sullenly.
“Man your age shouldn’t pout,” he said. He waited, heaved another sigh, slapped his thighs. “Well, I’m not going to try and pry it out of you. I’m your friend, schmuck. You need to talk, talk, I’ll listen. You may find you’re blowing whatever it is all out of proportion.”
“I don’t have a sense of proportion right now. Sorry, but there’re just some things that’re bigger than I am.”
“Have it your way. I’m going back where I can smoke. Come join me when you feel better. You don’t want to sweat out the storm of the Silurian in this little box.”
“What? Storm?”
Halfway through the hatchway, Chamberlain turned and gave me a big happy grin. “All signs meteorological point to a big ‘un piling up in the east. They’re evacuating the windward camps.”
He almost didn’t get through the hatchway before I did.
When the boat arrived with the contingent from Number Four camp, I spotted Vick at once. A moment later, I spotted King as well. He had shucked his fancy beachwear in favor of cut-offs and a T-shirt. He was sitting beside her in the boat. They were talking to each other. Whatever they were talking about, she looked as if she found it very interesting indeed. I told myself that it was only clinical interest, but even as I did, the sharp barb of jealousy sank into my aorta, as I saw, realized, that she was holding his hand, there was a sick awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I knew he had novelty going for him, and sculpted muscles, and youth, and he’d surely let only me see him sick and whiny, and I hardly counted.…
Everything looked so ordinary. Everyone was tired and dirty. No one paid any attention to the new lovers, regarded them strangely or enviously or hatefully or any way at all, not even Jank, who sat at the bow looking gloomily preoccupied. What really drove home the idea that, somehow, incredibly, she was with King was her looking up, seeing me, smiling, waving, calling out a friendly greeting. She was radiant with guiltless happiness. I moved my hand at my side, the best I could do by way of waving back. Suddenly desperate to escape from the boat bay, I turned to go, and there stood Claire Duvall, staring down at the two people among all the people in the boat, with an expression of disbelief on her face that was only beginning to yield to hurt and anger. She looked the way I felt. I brushed past her and stumbled numbly through the ship. Someone touched my arm and said, “Hey, Kev, you okay?” and I made a noise, slipped past, kept walking until I was in my cabin, shut in.
I sat down. I exhaled emphatically, as if that would take care of matters, let me go on with my day, my life. Of course it didn’t. I promptly found myself trying to pinpoint in memory the instant when the spark must have leaped between them. I shook those thoughts out of my skull only so I could wonder if she let him wear the headheld when they had sex, and if this wasn’t strictly a short-term pheromone-propelled kind of relationship anyway. It seemed to me that world-view had to matter even between the sheets, but then I thought of Westerman and Hendryx’s relationship, which had endured for years, and even prospered at times, in the face of major differences of opinion on every subject imaginable. I’d made so bold as to ask them about that, one time when we were sitting around ruining our livers, and received for an answer giggles from her and a dreamy grin from him. Pheromones.
I decided I needed some music and stuck Coleman Hawkins into the player. “I’m Through With Love,” “What Is There to Say?” I could have gone with Cab Calloway or Fats Waller, who would’ve worked hard to cheer me up; at least I didn’t choose Holiday and “Good Morning
, Heartache.” For all the difference it made. I went right on foundering in my tarpit of self-pity. I’d always loved women and the company of women. I’d had girlfriends since I was in third grade, lovers since I was in my mid-teens, a lifetime of love’s ups and downs, ins and outs. Yet I couldn’t believe how awful I felt now. I felt every bit as awful now as when I’d been a high-school sophomore and Judy Biesemeyer had broken my heart. Nothing had a right, I told myself, to hurt me as much in my sixties as it had at fifteen, and yet why, I asked myself, would I ever have thought that it wouldn’t? To which I could only answer, duh, dunno, just stupid, I guess. And at last it struck me, I hadn’t just been passed over, I wasn’t just stupid, I was ridiculous was what I was, a lover boy trapped in a flabby, loose-skinned, wrinkling, balding, shrinking, crumbling body, and the best I could hope for was that she hadn’t noticed how ridiculous I was, that she had thought of me the whole time merely as a sweet old gent, not as—
I glared at my antique map of Llanoria, land that never was, and decided what I really needed was a drink. I stood up and sat right back down again. The deck was tilted. Then it was level. Then it was tilted again, but in the opposite direction. I stuck my head into the companionway and yelled at the first person I saw, “The ship’s pitching!”
“Storm,” he said, as if replying to a child, and unhurriedly went on about his business.
On the fantail, Chamberlain was sitting in his deck chair and peering out to sea while his assistants busied themselves among the gadgets. I could hear people yelling at one another up on the helicopter deck as they lashed down aircraft. The ship raced with the sea and before a cool, moisture-heavy wind. Far astern, spanning the horizon, seeming to reach clear into the ionosphere, were sheer cliffs of dark gray cloud.
“Sweet Jesus,” I said, “where did that come from?”
“If that’s not a number twelve on the Beaufort scale, I’ll eat my barometer.” Chamberlain spared me a glance along his shoulder. “You look worse now than you did before.”
The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Page 68
