Cardinal Numbers: Stories (10 page)

Richard’s car trundled off the ferry. She saw his face—dark, drawn, uncertain—before he was able to prepare it, and felt comforted. He kissed her like a brother-in-law, spoke her name like a movie lover. They went to Ramona’s for cappuccino. Richard looked at his watch.

“What did you tell her?” she said.

“About a tropical medicine seminar in New Haven.”

“Did she believe you?”

“In her way. Don’t worry. It wouldn’t matter if she knew.”

“Does that mean you’ll tell?” She scraped angrily at dried foam inside her cup.

“Tell what?” He touched her face. “Erase all that. It’s just you and me now.”

That was the right thing to say, even the right way to say it. But her head was thick with the flu of her birthday. And her little sister, his wife, was the whole point. Yes? Her mental voice had a sore throat.

“Do you know how old I am?” she said.

“More or less.”

He stroked the back of her neck. They drove on dirt roads. She fingered the amber worry beads that dangled from the mirror.

“Would you like to swim?” she said, meaning, Can we take our clothes off now?

He answered by slapping in a Fats Waller tape. She remembered the winter Randi had won a scholarship competition, playing something slow and Slavic, wearing a popcorn-stitch sweater from Mother. She remembered the summer Randi went to study in Munich. Fats Waller sang about two sleepy people much too in love to say goodnight.

“You have beautiful ears,” Richard said.

But he did not stop the car.

As a punishment, they would have dinner with Molly that night and get very drunk. Richard and Molly would go upstairs. She would walk by herself on the cold, plain, moonlit beach. In the tide pools there will be starfish she will pick up and put back. Her footprints will be phosphorescent. She will climb back up the path and stand in wet grass outside her cabin until she can make herself go in.

Joan’s mental voice tired itself with such stories as they drove through the dust and were thirsty.

L
ARVELL STEPPED FROM MORNING
glare into the climate-controlled lobby. He had shaved in the car with his portable electric. This was his first appointment of the day. He was scheduled to meet with the operations manager to discuss how a new plant security system might or might not affect their liability coverage. A tall secretary with frosted hair escorted him from reception to the elevators, and then through the seventh-floor office wing.

“Have a seat.” She smiled insincerely. Her teeth probably were capped. “Mr. Koplik will be with you shortly.”

Larvell brought his knees together and placed the Samsonite briefcase across them. The material covering his chair was unpleasant, slithy. It was 10:12 by the digital clock.

“Sorry you had to wait.” Koplik rubbed his hands together too vigorously. “I was on long-distance.”

Koplik’s tie was a petroleum derivative. So was the Atlanta Falcons beverage mug on his desk.

Larvell hummed Proverbs 13:5—The righteous hate what is false—but it wasn’t helping.

The file tabs were red, blue, yellow.

“I thought we should review,” Larvell said.

Koplik was chewing gum. Very unprofessional.

“The terms of your policy,” Larvell said.

Here came static, while his own voice seemed to drift. Here came clammy bursts, and pulsing like a hose of blood around his head.

Koplik was leaning down toward him and holding a hand out.

BEING
rigorous and thoughtful, you could probably trace it way, way back. But the real trouble, the trouble that got in every waking minute and wouldn’t leave, had begun on Wednesday when he stopped for lunch at a Chuck’s Wagon outside Tuscaloosa. It was crowded, so he had to sit at the counter. He ordered white coffee and a French Dip, and the girl thanked him for his order, smiling. He pictured a great big steamboat roast with rosy meat puckering up under the serrations of a carving knife, and juice running down all golden with the essence of beef. Then he saw the girl tear open a foil packet and pour what was in it into the gravy dish. When Larvell saw the girl making his au jus from hot water and brown dust out of a packet, it was a message. It was a powerful message, a revelation of the bogus, the false, the synthetic. It overwhelmed him inside, a movement of spirit. It was like the Spirit of the Living God giving him as though never before eyes to see with and ears to hear, and the power to understand what he saw and what he heard. So Larvell knew there resided no more truth in the men around him than in their simulated rawhide wallets, drip-dry shirts, deodorant insoles, no more than in the plastic cactus of the room where they came to brag and sell. The pretend-posed-as-the-real was everywhere. Each new revelation of the revelation fell like a blow. Larvell was stunned, could barely keep his feet. He wanted to get in his car and just sit. But there was velour upholstery posing as velvet, and synthetic pine fragrance from a green cardboard tree on the dash. Larvell prayed as he drove and he prayed in his room at the Travelodge off I-59. He read in Joshua (Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be dismayed: for the Lord is with you wheresoever you go), and in Revelations (So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth). He asked God how he might come to wisdom through this understanding of synthetics. He asked for guidance. In the morning Larvell telephoned his wife. She had the radio on, a call-in show, and he told her to turn it down. He heard the practice in her voice, the effort of interest in what town he was calling from, which town he’d been in the day before, and which he was heading for now. Larvell tried to describe how it felt receiving the message, but somewhere between formation in his mind and execution by his mouth, the words fell apart. She said if he was about to go all Pentecostal at this hour, just forget it. He said that what he had now was like X-ray vision. She said Holly was out on the porch with her Froot Loops, and hold on while I get her. Larvell saw the hollow aluminum portico in front of his house. He saw his daughter in the swing seat, gazing at a smear of lipstick on her spoon, saw her running shoes come down on the green all-weather carpet meant to look like grass, and he hung up. For the rest of that day, and into the next, Larvell tried to will normalcy; that is, he tried to ignore all the confirmations. Like tanning salons. Like gas station dinosaurs, and billboards that said Home Cookin’! Like elevator music. He had a Saturday golf date with a Memphis friend, but didn’t go. Instead, he crossed over to Arkansas, into the piney woods. He got egg sandwiches and Nestea from a store, and pulled off at a cut in the road where a little stream ran and there were picnic tables. It was a dry, humming heat. He rolled up his sleeves, saw his arms all flabby and white. The eggs were salty and the bread soft. He tried listening to a Jimmy Swaggart sermon-on-tape (For it says no sin. It doesn’t say just a little bit; it says no sin shall enter there. Not even a hint), but it was too dramatized, too much for effect. It was a high sky; he went in the trees to get away from it. The dry mat of needles was springy underfoot. He could remember what it was like at nine years old back in Monterey, following jaybirds into a thicket. Here it was clear light just ahead, and a hissing sprinkler. Larvell counted eight house lots, three up for sale. He walked back to his car. There was a black lace bra in the trash. He got caught in the glare and push of afternoon traffic. All around him were these men surging, braking, clenching their jaws, with no recognition of what they were angry about. He saw the dealer license plate frames. Mel Brady Pontiac. Vince Farr Subaru. He saw a bumper sticker that said God Has Numbered Every Hair On Your Head … And On Your Wig, Too. That night Larvell got in a fight at the salad bar of the Airport Circle Inn. He was stopped dead there by the fake bacon bits made out of soy when this big moke goes, move it, bud, and raps him on the back of the hand with a dressing ladle. He sank a left hook under the moke’s liver and then they were rolling around on the floor with croutons in their hair. Larvell got put in holding with a skinny black kid in a torn rayon shirt, light blue with big white orchids. This kid had a thin smile. Cracker, he said, you don’t like me fifty-one ways from the ace of spades. It was Sunday, His day, when a guard came down to say there weren’t going to be any charges, and Larvell should get his ass out of town while it was still attached.

KOPLIK
wrung out the handkerchief, wrapped it around fresh ice, and returned it.

“Your color’s coming back,” he said.

The tall secretary with the gray streak dividing her bangs was right behind, bent in some unfinished gesture.

“I’m sorry,” Larvell said. “I don’t want to make trouble.”

“God, don’t apologize.”

Koplik squeezed Larvell’s shoulder; the girl straightened up, nodding.

“Hey, the stress thing. We all know what that’s like. Sure, aim high, eye on the prize. But then you get all wired in and you’re running around like an insect.” Koplik drew up his mouth at the corners. “Where’s the payoff?”

“With me it’s a caffeine addiction.” That big girl was still nodding. “And also refined sugars.”

Koplik fingered his inside pocket. “Don’t apologize. Really.”

“I’m going for acupuncture,” the girl said.

Larvell got up to go. He had the beige sport coat over his arm like a robber concealing a gun. He declined the taxi Koplik was insistent on phoning for. The outside air was heavy and thick, and it didn’t have to sneak up behind you. Here was the company logo in brushed chrome on a black marble slab, and then all this lawn with rollings built in, and thin trees put down like game markers.

DRIVING
till sunset, then sleeping jackknifed on the back seat until dawn. Crossing over the big river at Vicksburg, going down through Madison Parish, Lake Bruin, Waterproof, Cocodrie. It seemed important to have honest clothes—cotton T-shirt, denim pants, canvas shoes—and to throw the old things away. Slowing down along the blacktop to recognize that planing mill with its rust-sprung roof fallen in, Haney’s tar-papered barbecue place, the Pig Stand, and the four elms where you turned off to go midnight swimming. Larvell stopped the car and he could hear the underbrush whisper. This had all been Gannet land, leased for cotton from the Texas & Pacific. Junior Gannet shot up his leg hunting snipe from a horse. Lee Leon Gannet gave him the Esso station to run. It went from squinting weather into haze. The road stayed empty. They’d made a catchment and put in a boat ramp for sportsmen. Before, the land made a natural levee reinforced by trees. Each man would have his trees flagged, and he owned those trap lines, going out through mist after a cool night to pull his wire traps up out of the mud, shake the crawdads out, bait them back up with chicken guts. The road had a few sail-rabbits, which meant any creature squashed flat and dried hard enough to pick up and skim through the air. Right across from where Larvell ran out of gas, let the car half skew down a kudzu bank, was the spot where Cal Stark and his big brother wanted to build the Monterey Assembly of God Church. Ground’s too soft, and too far out in the woods, Lee Leon said, and it was his money. Cal Stark had a little fifteen-minute morning radio show on WNTZ sponsored by Bluebelle Vanilla Wafers. He sang a Jim Reeves ballad, gave the weather, did something uptempo with flat-picking, read an item of human interest from the news, always finished with a hymn. Cal finally married Gail Fullham, who played piano in the cinder-block church her uncle went and put up right in town. She answered every altar call, and spoke in the unknown tongues. Larvell came down two years ago when Orris Mitchell got married to a Fullham cousin—he and Mitch had run around Houston together when they were young, worked construction, sold used cars. Mitch told how on the far bank of the Tensas, up by Ray’s Bluff, cows would get loose and wander over on the drag strip that had gone in there like they had an old memory passed down in the blood. Because Wimp Gannet pasturing out there took you way, way back. Lee Haney ran his still about that same time, a fifty-gallon unit in a cave back under the bluff, and they’d be in there tending the firebox, tapping the petcock, eating side meat and corn fritters from a black iron skillet. Lee had Choctaw blood. Bit off a treasury man’s nose, died in prison. Airborne seed fluff went by. Someone tended the footpath. Larvell, mounting to the little cemetery in the trees, said something under his breath.

BUDDED ON EARTH TO BLOOM IN HEAVEN

Baby Langston, just two, from croup. The limestone marker with a lamb carved in. Weeds pulled and leaf trash swept by. Higher ground. Solid ground and plain truth. My kinsmen have gone away. Aunt Lucille never played cards or went to a movie, said a woman shouldn’t smell but of lye soap.

1891–1965

PEACE AT LAST IN HIS ARMS

Moss in the pipe rail joints, geraniums wilting in a big tomato can. Gannet land, red dirt. Pop dug up an arrow point and said it was Indian mounds. Wagging his finger, learn to follow your trail through life without leaving one. Be tested, be brave. Clipping from the Beaumont paper on a derrick fire victim named Roy Moore, 53. She said it might be another one, not our Roy. Scolding the molasses on her greens, the sugar diabetes and the blubber on her hips. A continuous test of faith. Set a crucible in the fire, and let it be a refining fire. Cut amber beads on her dresser. Satin pillows and a mansion on the hill.

WILMETTE JUNE GANNET MOORE LOVING MEMORIES

Larvell said something under his breath.

U
NAVOIDABLY, ALWAYS, HUMMING SPIDERS
and iridescent lichen brought notice of spring to the domain. A great sigh, and the people said, well, of course, yes, again. Off came the shutters, and the lids from the water troughs. Hedgerows were unlimbered from burlap. In the high unthawed meadows llamas agreed to prolonged sleep, and in warm blue inland lagoons the triggerfish were through practicing. At the palace, modest in size really, with its glass moat and untruculent sandstone battlements, modest for all to see—at his palace, Francois Rogelio IV, Emperor, puttered with chapel furnishings.