State of Grace (21 page)

When he gets back to the trailer, the boy lies down on the couch. In a corner, the hound is breathing lightly in a heroic whisper. The air of the room hangs in dusty layers. Lizards skid across the glass. Everything smells unused. It is something he cannot understand. Everything here seems to be used slightly for the wrong purpose, although, he would admit, the results seem to be the same.

The walls of the trailer are cardboard. They buckle out like sails. The girl has taped up colored pictures torn from magazines. None of her selections are original, but she has insisted upon explaining them to him. There’s a picture of a sculpture of James Joyce beside his new grave in Zurich. There are recipes for rich desserts, ads for movies, clothes, hardware. Her favorite, she told him, is the photograph of a tropical bird. She loves it, she says, and describes it to him. It requires high temperatures and is gregarious. Its massive soft bill is a puzzle, as is its long bristled tongue, as it only
eats fruit and has no need for such equipment. The bird is actually seven different colors. Mauve, she says, one, blueberry, rose, purple, four, she tells him, emerald green and smoldering orange. That’s only six she realizes, but the other is merely white. Flaming and liturgical colors but the photograph is black and white and fading. It wasn’t dipped in the proper solution. It’s almost gone but will probably not disintegrate further. She insists that the bird is truly as depicted. It possesses the requirements of another creature.

The boy despises metaphor. He grows irritable. To think of her is maddening. He wants to reach some point of reference, something marvelous about them as lovers, but his mind dwells only on the commonplace.

He wakes once. It is dark but close to morning. The night has passed and he is making love to her. It is so good; she is smiling and her body is cool. He feels cured, rediscovered. He turns on the light and the hound blinks at them, feebly raising its tail and letting it fall, and everything seems beautiful, full of hope and lucky chance and love. He tells the girl this and she agrees. The animal closes his eyes once more and sleeps. Together they watch him mend. No man has ever died beside a sleeping dog.

THE UNIMAGINABLE PRETENDED TO BE INEVITABLE
. Inevitable it was. Unimaginable it was not. Kate has a young man. They may or may not be married. If so, it is a secret. Married girls, past, present or future, are not allowed to reside in sorority houses. Uxorial vagaries are not permitted. How archaic the idea of a sorority house, how truly peculiar! All the references made within can be construed as sexual ones. When in doubt, snicker.
Nihil est sine spermate
they shriek over their tuna fish.

Kate is living with the girls at Omega Omega Omega. Not just yet, but in a little while. They do not know there that she has a young man. When she returns, they will recognize her
as the girl who had been with them before, scrubbing herself with a bar of tar soap in the shower stall. Tar soap—the funniest thing they’d ever seen. She was queer as the girl from Massachusetts. Things that Northerners did seldom caught on. Things either caught on or they didn’t. Your boy friend had either a Porsche or a Pinto. You either knew how to do all your Christmas shopping in Goodwill stores or you did not. They will know Kate when she returns. In her absence, the girl from Massachusetts had left for good. The peachy complexion of the girl from Massachusetts had gone all to bumps in the South. She attributed it to the fact that she couldn’t rinse her face in her baby brother’s pee any more. Diluted. Five to one. Among themselves, the others agreed that Northerners were the oddest things and fast and filthy in their ways.

In college, Kate studied French. She studied French and she had lovers, usually men that she picked up in the afternoon or evening. Kate never made an acquaintance before one o’clock. Men can’t think strange in the morning. Men in the morning think of ham and hotcakes and money. They want order and the familiar.

She was never disappointed with her lovers, even the dreadful ones, because they gave her life the feeling of great transparence and they made her feel restful and inconsequential.

Her first dreadful lover in town was the first one she took, shortly after she arrived. It was the day of the evening she met her friend Corinthian Brown. Her first lover was not very pleasant. He was a cab driver. He told her one thing right away.

“I used to be a deep-sea diver,” he said. “For seven years they could count on me to go down after anything. Anything. Jewels, boats, bombs, bodies. No matter what it was, the last twenty feet I’d be sinking through silt. That’s no kind of a job,” he said.

She hailed him as she came out of a used book shop. She
had just been given as many books as she could take away if she took them away right away and so she had called for a cab. Kate had taken to walking through the town in the dead part of the afternoon. Nothing ever came of it. Her back would get wet from the terrible sun. She would wait until three o’clock before she’d have a cooling drink. It was the least she could do. It was the most she could do to wait until three. On the day that she took shelter in the book shop, it was not yet three. She went in there to get out of the rain. The sun was shining and the rain was pouring through the streets like smoke.

“I’m not in business any more,” a woman hollered to her. “I’m not keeping things going for that crummy bastard any more.” Kate looked glumly at the rain. “Take what you want. I’m Lady Bountiful. Clean the place out,” the woman screamed. “He never gave me a thing I didn’t end up paying on. Forty-nine years with him,” she yelled, “and not one happy moment.”

She wore a hairpiece that rose and fell on her head. She wore a dress that had a print of flowers and their scientific names and she smoked a Silva-Thin.

“I suppose you came in here to get out of the rain,” she snapped. “Well, it’s all past mattering. I’ll tell him if he ever has the nerve to ask. I gave them all away, I’ll tell him, all your crummy books, to a chippie who at least had the crummy sense to come in out of the rain. Well, come on,” she said. “COME ON, goddamnit!” Kate had never met a retiree before. She was not astounded. Nevertheless, she was careful not to move too quickly.

Kate helped her throw the books in boxes. There were dry bug shells on the shelves.

“Over there was where I saw the rat,” she said, pointing into a little alcove. A sign said hopefully,
THE ROOM OF KNOWLEDGE
. “He didn’t do a thing about it naturally. I got it myself. Peanut butter.”

“What?” Kate said, speaking her once and only.

“Peanut butter,” the woman said irritably. “IN THE TRAP!”

Kate hauled several cartons of books onto the street. The rain had stopped and the air was steamy. She waved to the old woman. The old woman was eating yogurt and she waved her spoon at Kate. Then Kate called the cab. They put everything in the back seat and she sat up front with the driver. His hair was combed back flat and wet and severely from his forehead in a ’20’s fashion and he reeked of Juicy Fruit.

“Yeah?” the driver said, raising his eyebrows.

“Omega Omega Omega,” Kate said. Her sunglasses were steamed up. “Do you have a Kleenex?” she said.

The driver looked at her sideways. There was something about her, he decided. To get women these days, a man had to have good instincts, accurate judgment. He fancied his mind as being swift as a steel trap. He fancied his body as being hard and cruel as a steel trap. He saw himself, it’s true, as one mean old knowledgeable boy. And this fare was showing off her underwear. When he was putting the books in the cab for her, he saw her bra. Not the wide, white kind that his wife wore, which was big enough to strangle a hog, but a tiny colored one, a tiny blue polka-dot piece of nothing.

“I’ll stop and get some,” he said. He pulled into a gas station and bought a box of Kleenex. He pulled out several for her and then put the box in a glove compartment. “You’re my last fare of the day, isn’t that coincidental,” he said. “I mean it’s been a long day but it’s still early. Too early to start in reading all them books.” Beneath the Juicy Fruit there was a smell of spicy tomatoes. “You don’t look like a bookworm to me.”

Kate wiped off her sunglasses. She put them back on.

“How about joining me for a drink?” he said.

“Why not,” Kate said. Her reply did not surprise her although
it was not at all what she would have imagined herself saying.

“I know a nice little place. It’s a bar on the water and they give you free lasagne roll-ups with your drinks until six.” He took a series of hard rights and turned onto the highway. The books slid across the seat. In less than a mile he turned off and down a partially paved road that led to a point on the bay. The land was bulldozed flat. Models for condominiums were scattered around and little flags and pennants were strung between concrete electricity poles. Then the land became wild and overgrown again and then there was the bay.

The bar was a shingled house on pilings. Nailed on the walls were sharks’ tail fins.

“Two of those mothers is mine,” the cab driver said. There was no one in the place but them and the bartender. The bartender was sneezing. “Two Mai-Tais,” the driver ordered. Kate turned on her stool and looked out the window.
BRYANT’S BEASTS
, a sign said over a crooked building on the other side of the road.
BRYANT’S BOATS BRYANT’S BUNGALOWS
. “Here’s to you,” the driver said. She took a swallow of her drink. It was all rum with a plastic orchid and a canned pineapple chunk in it. Her throat constricted and her eyes began to water. The driver coughed. “Them sharks will go for your hoses every time,” he said. “That’s no kind of a job.” He coughed. “What’s going on?” he asked the bartender.

“Algae,” the bartender said morosely. “Two days now. It’s not red tide but it’s some lousy algae rotting out there.”

“Goddamn,” the driver said. He got up. “You wait here,” he told Kate. He went outside and walked over to the bungalows. Kate thought of Uncle Wiggly. He was always so snug and clean. She swallowed her drink until it was gone. She saw something change hands between the driver and another man. He came back to the bar, coughing. “Two more Mai-Tais,” he said.

The bartender turned away. “Why don’t we drink these
over in that little cottage over there,” the driver said to Kate, smiling firmly. “We can’t hardly breathe here. They got fans in those cottages.” The bartender set down two fresh drinks. “Where are those free noodles today?” the driver asked him querulously, looking up and down the counter.

“Nobody’s been here all day. I didn’t make them today. It wouldn’t have been economic.”

“Goddamn,” the driver said.

“I don’t kiss,” Kate said.

“I couldn’t care less,” the driver muttered. She followed him to the first little cabin.

“Look at that,” he said before they went inside. “Ain’t that cute. Little window boxes and a weather vane.” Inside, the room was cool. Her throat and eyes stopped troubling her.

“Bryant’s the biggest flit I’ve ever seen,” the driver said.

When they came out later it was almost dark. The wind had changed and the air was clear. The bar was lighted and Kate could see people moving around inside.

“I gotta get back,” the driver said tensely. “I got obligations.”

“I think I’ll stay,” Kate said. “I think I’ll have another drink.”

“I couldn’t care less,” the driver said. She went back into the bar and played the juke box. The patrons were mostly parents and their children drinking ginger ale.

“That was the song!” a child shouted. “That woman played just exactly the song I was going to play. Now I won’t have to play it.”

Kate went into the ladies’ room.
GULLS
it said. She washed her hands and went back through the bar and outside. Between the bungalows and
BRYANT’S BEASTS
were stacked the boxes of her books. Her sunglasses were steamed up again and she still didn’t have a Kleenex. She took them off. She could hardly see any better even then, it being night. She went over to the crooked building that held the animals.
There was a bleak smell of droppings. She tried to look in the dark windows.

“What are you doing around here?” a voice hissed. “You been sent out here by somebody to drop a match?”

“Oh no,” Kate said sadly.

“They probably said ‘You just go on out there and move around and smoke a little,’ ” Corinthian Brown’s voice said.

“I came over to see the animals,” she said. “I just wanted to look at them.”

“Jest?” the voice rose. “Jest! That’s something which ain’t easy at all!” But the door opened up and she went in.

CORINTHIAN BROWN’S DADDY
shot down robins in the winter and baked them in delicious flaky pies. His daddy always would say that he could never understand how a bird so full of shit as the robin, dumping all his mean bug and berry shit over the clean clothes on the clothesline, could taste so good cut up in little pieces with a few peas and a little flour and water. His daddy shot up robins so neat you would have thought they weren’t dead at all.

One morning as Little Corinthian was turning out of the yard to get to school, a police cruiser came screaming up the street and turned into their yard, shaking up the mud and almost knocking down the porch. The Audubon Society had complained, the Chamber of Commerce, the League of Women Voters and the Surfside Bank who always had their ear to the ground for the rumble of possible trends. The tourists were horrified, the paper indignant and Brown became an object of rage and the chosen warning to the Negro community that the sick practice would no longer be tolerated. In Night Court four months later, he was sentenced to two years in the County Jail. The only voice raised in his behalf was that of an ugly smart-assed little dribble of a man who was later found to be not wanting to pay his federal income tax and who said that the shooting of songbirds in the
neighborhood would not be necessary were there better housing and more jobs. Everyone agreed that if they heard that song one more time they’d throw up.