by Jim Harrison
“I never ate in a French restaurant.” He was looking over my shoulder at the only one in town. “Are we dressed up enough?”
“I've been in there. It costs a lot.”
“I'll buy. I won a lot of this at poker in the hospital.”
“How long were you there?”
“Two months.”
This was the first reference to his face. It was sort of a mess at close range and I wondered why the Army hadn't done plastic surgery.
“I'm not going back to the hospital,” he said, anticipating my question.
He asked me what I was doing in town and I said that I came every year for a month or two to fish. I rambled on about the fishing and admitted that it seemed that every year I became less capable at it to the point that I dreaded going out with those who fished well. I said that it had always struck me that unless you were able to become single minded about fishing and hunting you would fail. You were either obsessive and totally in control or you were nothing. He didn't appear interested in these subtleties. I suddenly thought that it would be fun to kick the shit out of someone in a few seconds, which was obviously one of his talents. I reflected on all the multifoliate ways you parry when you first meet someone.
When we got up to leave I noticed for the first time that the eagle on his tattoo had a beak that was drawn up into a maniacal smile and asked him about it.
“Just a joke to piss people off.”
“They're going to dam up the Grand Canyon,” I said halfway across Duval Street. Tim stopped and looked at me, puzzled. A car beeped.
“You're shitting me.”
“Nope.”
We entered the resturant and the hostess with a quick knowing glance seated us in a corner as far from other customers as possible.
“Where'd you hear about that?” he said looking at the menu.
“I read about it. It's true.” For a moment I had been lost. It had only been an errant comment.
“No kidding?”
“Word of honor,” I said raising my two fingers in a mock cub scout sign.
“Jesus Christ, it will fill up with water.” He was clearly troubled and I wanted to drop the subject.
I ordered drinks from the waiter who was obviously a homosexual. He raised his eyebrows at me as if I had scored and I was terribly embarrassed. But then I supposed that we didn't look like we quite fit together. Some homosexuals have an uncanny ability to figure people out by their immediate appearances.
“I don't understand this shit. You order for us.”
I asked for two orders of steak au poivre and some endive, which seemed inoffensive. Then the waiter asked us if we wanted wine.
“Yeah, I want some fucking champagne,” Tim said a bit loudly but the waiter was charmed.
We got out of the place with difficulty. The food was excellent, especially the endive which reminded me of New York, but the waiter tried to clip us when he returned the change. We had had a half dozen cups of Cuban coffee which had a nerve-jangling effect mixed with all the pepper and alcohol. The owner placated us at the door with assurances that it wasn't intentional on the waiter's part but I felt very melancholy pondering all the little cheats people pull on one another. Up on Big Pine Key a wealthy angler from Vermont had tried to cheat on a fishing record by filling the gullet of a bonefish with sinkers. He had bribed his guide to go along with the little project. A gesture at a corner of immortality and not at all concomitant with what you thought of the stern Yankees. Meanwhile the waiter was standing sullen in the background.
“You ought to fire that cocksucker,” Tim said loudly.
“Let's go.” I pulled on his arm. His word had had a magical effect on the restaurant. We were being looked at in mute wonderment. I waved and grinned at some people I knew. I wanted to leave before the owner called the police. The local police were very authoritative. A few nights before I had seen one dragging a shrimper from a bar by the hair and the shrimper's eyes were buggy with pain. I was somehow sure that Tim wouldn't react gracefully to such treatment.
CHAPTER
2
WE WALKED around the corner and into Captain Tony's, which was dark and crowded. Behind the dancing area a jug band was playing and a guy with a pigtail was singing loudly and not very well. We moved down the length of the bar and sat near the pool table and jukebox.
“I wish I had one.”
“One what?” It was hard to hear over the music. I tried to signal the barmaid.
“A pigtail.”
“You're putting me on.” This was a surprise—my ordinary conception of a Georgia cracker involved shooting treed blacks or messing around with old cars, though as time passed it seemed much easier for a black to get himself shot in Detroit than anyplace else. “You could grow one.”
“How long would it take?”
“Don't know. Never grew one.”
He was becoming plaintive and morose about the prospect of waiting for a pigtail. The barmaid came and I ordered two beers. She looked bored but took an unusual interest in Tim which made me slightly jealous as I had never been able to gather her attention. Tony always hires the most beautiful barmaids in Key West and the Navy pilots come in numbers, fall in love and are rejected. The barmaids, it seems, are in love with musicians and other worthless types who wear pigtails and are always broke. The barmaids are not interested in sleek pilots with thin mustaches and wallets full of flight pay. When the blond one whose name was Judy bent over the cooler to get our beer we were cleanly mooned. Polka-dot panties. But I knew she was hopeless because she lived with a rather affable freak who sold tacos from a pushcart.
I realized we had become less drunk and would have to start over again, a practice that is known as a double-header. I had clearly peaked out and was on my way down. I could scarcely swallow the beer, my head ached and I wanted a nap, full dress and under the covers. By myself. All the pepper on the steak had given me heartburn and I needed some Gelusil.
“That's really true?” Tim was staring into my eyes.
“What?”
“About the Grand Canyon?”
“It's at least in the planning stage.” Now I truly regretted saying anything.
“I've never seen the Grand Canyon.”
I was on the verge of saying it was very large then giggled at the idea. I had seen Glen Canyon years ago before it was literally drowned and liked it better but any comparison was absurd with such splendors. And besides I was a Chicken Little and tended to believe in nonsense. I had once read in a New York underground newspaper that an asteroid was going to hit Long Island Sound and the resultant tidal wave would kill everyone. I sat in our little apartment in Port Jefferson and brooded about the logic and scientific probabilities involved. I convinced my wife and she had nightmares of burning railroad cars and bloated sheep. When the appointed day went by without a single asteroid I was embarrassed.
“We probably ought to blow up the goddamn thing.” Tim nodded in assent then spoke but I couldn't hear him over the band. I suddenly felt very bored and claustrophobic. “I got to go.”
“Why? We're just getting started.”
“I'm tired and I have to be up at six tomorrow to fish.”
“I'll fix you up.” He began searching his pockets then stood and looked blankly at me. “Ride with me to my sister's. I got some uppers.”
I hesitated, weighing alternatives. Did I want to get blasted? If I did I wouldn't go fishing in the morning. With a hangover a two-foot chop sends me puking despite Merazine. Probably be too windy anyway—I had noticed the palms swaying on the side street. And maybe this guy was crazy too. I hadn't envied the sailor. I didn't like the idea of dropping speed with alcohol in my guts. Blood pressure soars. I looked at my watch—only nine o'clock—and remembered how much I had always disliked people who copped out on a good drunk. You would just get started talking and laughing and playing pool and they would go home to their wives. Pussy-whipped we called it. I couldn't go home to my wife. Six months now.
&nb
sp; “Let's hear the rest of the set first.” The jug band was getting better. A tall black woman was singing a Joplin tune, a graceful reverse gesture. She was well over six foot and wore a white silk sheath dress that allowed her hip bones to protrude. She was awesome.
“God I'd like some of that,” Tim said.
I nodded agreement but admitted to myself that I wouldn't dare try it. Now that I had decided to stick it out the beer went down easily and I thought how deftly the brain screws up the stomach and breathing. We played a few games of nineball for five dollars and I lost them all.
“You can owe me,” he said.
I checked my wallet. I had two hundred back in the room but had to make it last. I put twenty-five dollars in my pocket each morning and stuck to this budget. I had nearly run out of people to borrow from. The liquor was obviously bothering my shooting more than his. It was between sets and the jukebox was playing a Beatles tune that had a phrase “we all shine on.” I liked the music but the lyrics were so patently absurd. How like me to be questioning the rock lyrics when I should have been concentrating on pool. There goes the allowance.
“Let's go get that shit and come back.”
Tim drove very fast but capably down the back streets until we caught Route 1 for the short trip to Stock Island. A Detroit jockey, a Dodge with four on the floor. His sister lived in a large mobile home and was watching the tube when we entered. Marcus Welby, M.D. She was frowsy and dilapidated, perhaps ten years older than Tim.
“Pleased to meetcha,” she said without getting off the couch. I sat and watched the Doctor with her while Tim went in the other room. It seems the Doctor was telling a young woman that her husband had to have a kidney transplant and they couldn't afford it. Her eyes flickered moistly as did Tim's sister's. Commercial. The room smelled of fried potatoes.
“Where you from?” she said turning from the set.
“Michigan.”
“My husband he's from Flint. He's in Pensacola for a few days. Want a beer?” She was drinking hers straight from the can.
“No thanks.”
Tim came in with a bottle of pop.
“Offer your friend a Coke, Timmy.” The commercial was over and she was watching Marcus as he strode resolutely across a hospital parking lot.
“No. We're going. See you later.”
“Be careful,” she said.
I had been staring at a lamp in the corner that had a black plaster leopard as its base. From the leopard's skull protruded the stem and bulb and shade. The leopard had green pastel eyes and painted white snarling teeth and a chipped jaw.
When we got into the car he handed me two spansules which I dropped with a swig of pop. He dropped four.
“You're going to fuck up your head.”
“Right,” he said.
On the way back downtown we talked about college which I couldn't remember very well. He said that he had gone to Georgia Tech for two years before dropping out and enlisting. It wasn't too hard but it was boring and there had been too few cunt around the place. He had re-upped after his first year in Vietnam to get the extra volunteer pay and to avoid marriage. He thought he had got his girl pregnant but then she miscarried. It somehow sounded old fashioned.
We pulled up near Tony's and it was even more crowded than before. I talked to a head I knew vaguely and he gave me directions for a party on Sugarloaf Key after the bar closed. The speed had already taken effect and my system was winding up like a jet engine. I felt young and stupid. Tim looked calm enough though his eyes were a bit glittery. We bought drinks for two college girls from Ohio and asked them if they wanted to go to a party. They were suspicious. Too straight. And I was twenty-eight, clearly not a college student, and Tim's scar didn't seem to help.
“Why don't you go home and play with each other. See if we give a shit,” he said. They were startled and moved quickly to the far end of the bar. Then we asked a hip-looking girl with long blond hair if she wanted a drink and she accepted and when we mentioned a party she said she already knew about it but would ride with us. She recognized me from the Cuban diner where I ate regularly. I was disappointed—she was vacant and simple-minded—but Tim was enthralled. A fat soiled-looking girl approached and our new friend offered her a ride. She was homely but her brain was absolutely vivacious compared to the beauty who kept saying she was “strung out” as if the condition were unique on earth.
On the way out to Sugarloaf Key we passed around several bombers that Tim took from under the dashboard. The grass was Colombian buds, dry and hot and powerful. I entered some sort of fantasy time warp where I was out on the flats at noon repeating and perfecting every bad cast I had made in five years. I now felt that my brain was a purring electric motor and that my fingers would fry people at touch. Usually with drugs there was a small undisturbed center in my brain that could view what was happening with clarity. But it had been swallowed by the unilaterally manic notion that my whole body was less than an inch thick and the only backing I had on earth was the back seat of a car. Now the warm air coming in the window reminded me of a thousand other summer nights and I was dazed and constricted. The fat girl began humming. I thought in self-defense of the pleasant time I had had when I dropped four hits of psilocybin, lay down in a creek for an hour and became a trout. An infatuation with poisons.
We pulled into a yard after some confused circling. The subdivision roads were made of crushed coral and the noise of the tires was nearly unbearable. It was a small place built on the principle of stilts in anticipation of tropical storms, with the lower half of the house given over to a utility room and a screened-in area and the upper half containing kitchen and bedrooms, the functional living space. The house abutted a canal; I knew you could go out the canal and through Tarpon Creek to get to the Gulf Stream or Loggerhead Key. The shrubbery was dense and there were about a dozen cars. The music was very loud and when we entered people seemed sprayed about everywhere in a semi-comatose state. I went upstairs to the kitchen and drank a lot of lukewarm water from the tap. All water is piped from the mainland but I didn't want to snoop in their refrigerator for the water bottle even in my advanced state of looniness. A group was sitting at the kitchen table talking intently and passing a joint. Smelled strange, perhaps laced with something. I went back downstairs looking for Tim but couldn't find him. Then I went outside to muffle the music a bit and some people were swimming beneath a dim boathouse light. The light attracted an enormous swarm of insects some of which looked as large as sparrows. I shed my clothes and jumped into the warm brackish water. No sharks I hoped but they rarely come into the canals: out on the flats at night tearing into mullet or anything that moves. I hung in the water, my hand grasping a tire that served as a boat buffer; dizzy, weightless, joyless. The pretty girl was next to me but her face was flat as a magazine cover. I reached out and touched her. She began giggling and I became more conscious though it was apparent that my body was made of rubber, an extension of the tire I held on to. I felt her sex, slippery in the water, and she squeezed her eyes shut. I held my breath and sank into the water and began nuzzling her but it required too much effort. She climbed up the ladder and I followed, a dazzling sight. We gathered our clothes and walked through the bushes to Tim's car and got into the back seat still wet with salt water. She took a joint from her purse and I lit it taking only two drags as I was so spaced I was sure the car was moving. Vague taste of hash. A single mosquito. I began kissing her again and she dropped the roach out the window and returned the gesture. Skin sticking to the Naugahyde with the glue of wet salt. But I was a small motor again, metallic. Part of my brain thought of my wife and how we hid behind sexuality when nothing else worked. Saline. Aqueous. I watched my lower half drift out to sea.
CHAPTER
3
WAKING. In a jumble. What noise was that? Tim's face framed in the car window. After dawn. My ear still against her thigh, my head light. Tim smoking a cigarette looked a trifle scary—the wound was more distinct when he was pale, fa
tigued. He stared at the sleeping girl, his head half in the window. Blond above and brown below. Trickery. I rubbed my face and extricated myself and her limbs were limp, unwaking. I took my clothes from the front seat and crawled out. Most of the cars were still there but covered with dew. I dressed and smoked a cigarette.
“You sure lucked out,” Tim whispered, gazing at the girl.
“I didn't know she was that pretty.” I tried very hard but couldn't remember anything pleasant except the flex of her butt when she climbed the ladder under the lamp with beads of water falling. And a generalized ache about home.
We walked toward the house. Tim said he had snorted a few lines of cocaine but it wasn't good. Then someone had put nearly a lid of Colombian in a huge waterpipe and people had become comatose. What joy. In the kitchen the fat girl we had given a ride to had made coffee and a pitcher of orange Kool-Aid which I despised but drank anyway. It made one seven years old again. My mustache smelled of the sea.
“Where did you and Marilyn disappear to?” the fat girl asked.
“He was out getting protein.” Tim laughed. I suspected he had dropped some more pills. Fingers drumming on the table, bouncing aimlessly around the room.
I went over to the sink and washed my face. The water even smelled bad. I took an ice cube out of the Kool-Aid and dropped it in my coffee letting the splash burn my hand. The first sensation of the day.
“Anyone going to Miami?” She had her back turned and was looking out the window at an egret that picked its way along the canal bank.
The question seemed to puzzle Tim. I was disoriented and Miami had sounded like a foreign country. Anyone going to Germany or Peru. A palmetto bug made its way across the floor and Tim stepped on it. A squishy crackling sound out of proportion to the bug's size.
