The clouds drew closer and gusts of wind ruffled the surface of the brown water. Drops of rain struck the windows. I left my stool and moved across the room for a better look at things, taking a table next to the American woman. Four pelicans in a column were gliding over the water, almost touching it. Behind them came two more. These two were flapping their heavy wings and they were climbing up to the misty edges of the cloud. A shaft of lightning struck the second bird and he contracted into a ball and fell like a rock. The other one took no notice, missing not a beat with his wings.
I was astonished. I knew I would tell this pelican story over and over again and that it would be met with widespread disbelief but I thought I might as well get started and so I turned to the woman and the boy and told them what I had seen. I pointed out the floating brown lump.
She said, “It looks like a piece of wood.”
“That's a dead pelican.”
“I heard the thunder but I didn't see anything.”
“I saw the whole thing.”
“I love storms.”
“I think this is just a convective shower. Afternoon heat.”
This woman or girl was about thirty years old and she was wearing blue jeans and one of those grain-sack shirts from Mexico with the faded printing on it. Her sunglasses were parked high on her head. I asked if I might join her. She was indifferent. She had a hoarse voice and both she and the boy had sunburned faces. Her name, I learned, was Christine Walls. She was an artist from Arizona. She had a load of Arizona art in her van and she and the boy had been wandering about in Mexico and Central America. She extended an index finger across the table, for shaking, it finally dawned on me, and I took it and gave it a tentative shake.
I told her that I had recently dreamed of just such a tableau as thisâa woman and a small boy and I seated before a low table. She didn't know what to make of me. First the pelican and now this. The details, I should say, didn't correspond exactly. Christine didn't have nice clothes like those of the woman in the dream and Victor didn't appear to be a little smart-ass like Travis, although he was clunking his heels against the seat in a rhythmic way that I found irritating. Still, the overall picture was close enough. Too close!
She asked my date of birth. We exchanged views on the heat. I remarked on her many sparkling rings and said that my wife Norma was also fond of silver and turquoise. She asked me what the prevailing colors were in Little Rock and I couldn't remember, I who am so good on colors. She said her former husband was a Mama's boy. His name was Dean Walls and he wouldn't make a move without first consulting his mother. He was a creepy spider, she said, who repaired watches in a well-lighted cubicle on the first floor of a large department store. We talked about the many different vocations in life and I had to confess that I had none. The boy Victor was being left out of our conversation and so I asked him if he was enjoying his travels. He didn't answer. I asked him how many states he had been in and he said, “More than you.” Christine said she planned to return to college one day and study psychology, and that she would eventually make her home in Colorado or San Francisco or maybe Vermont. An earlier plan to marry again had collapsed when her fiancé was killed in a motorcycle accident. His name was Don and he had taught oriental methods of selfdefense in a martial arts academy.
“They called it an accident,” she said, “but I think the government had him killed because he knew too much about flying saucers.”
“What did he know?”
“He knew a lot. He had seen several landings. He was a witness to those landings outside Flagstaff when they were kidnapping dogs.”
“What kind of dogs?”
“What kind of dogs were they, Victor?”
“Collies and other work dogs. The aliens stunned them first with electric sticks.”
“Yes, and Don had seen all that and so the government had to silence him.”
I asked if she and the boy would like to join me in a swim before dark.
“In the pool?”
“No, I'm not a guest here. I was thinking about the beach.”
“I love to walk the beach but I can't swim.”
“How does it happen that you can't swim, Christine?”
“I don't know. Have you been here long?”
“Just a few days.”
“How was your trip down?”
“It was a nightmare.”
“A nightmare. I love that. Have you had much trouble with the money?”
“No, I haven't exchanged any yet.”
The boy Victor clapped one hand to his forehead and fell back against the seat and said, “Oh brother, is he in for it!”
Christine said, “You're not just a-woofin', buddy boy. This money is really something else. They call it a dollar but it's not the same value as ours. It's worth some odd fraction like sixtyeight cents. Even Victor can't get it straight. Hey, Ray, I want to ask you a question before I forget it. Why are there so darned many hardware stores in Belize?”
“Are there a lot? I hadn't noticed that.”
“I've seen two already.” She touched my arm and lowered her voice. “Don't stare but wait a second and then look at that fantastic girl.”
“Where?”
“That black waitress. The way she holds her head. See. Her regal bearing.”
Two hardware stores didn't seem like a lot to me. This was Staci talk. Nerve gas. I would have to stay on my toes to follow this stuff. She suddenly went into a contortion, trying to scratch a place on her back that was hard to reach. She laughed and twisted and said, “What I need is a back scratcher.”
I thought she meant just that, a long bronze rod with little claws at one end, and maybe she did, but then I saw what a good chance I had missed for an initial intimacy, always so awkward. The moment had passed, needless to say, the itching abated, by the time I had worked it all out.
Christine wasn't a guest at the Fort George either. She was looking for a place to take a bath. She had tried to rent a room with a bath for an hour or so instead of an entire day but the Fort George didn't offer that plan and neither did it accept works of art in payment. I volunteered the use of the communal bath at the Fair Play. She quickly accepted and began to get her things together.
Then I thought about trying to get her past Ruth without paying. I wasn't in the mood for any hotel comedy. I had spoken too soon. The towels were never quite dry at the Fair Play. The bathroom was a foul chamber too, and the door wouldn't lock, the knobs and the brass mechanism being completely gone, the wood all splintered around the hole, where some raging guest had forced an entry or an exit. I knew what would happen. This boy Vic would say, “P.U., Mom!” and make me look bad. So I took them instead to the Unity Tabernacle. They followed me in the van. It was a Volkswagen and it made a four-cylinder micro-clatter. There were decals of leaping green fish and bounding brown deer on both sides of the vehicle, a sporting touch I would not have associated with Christine and Victorâor with Dean, for that matter.
Ten
M
RS. SYMES WAS in front of the church. She was wearing a man's felt hat and she was talking to a gang of boys who were milling about, waiting to see Tarzan. She was upset because Father Jackie had not yet delivered the film for the big showing.
This Christine distraction annoyed her further but she told me to take the girl in and show her the bath. I expected no less, even though I knew that Mrs. Symes's tangled creed must be based more or less on faith rather than works. The doctor himself had told me that she had fed more tramps during the Depression than any other person in Louisiana.
Christine decided to do her laundry too, and I helped her carry it up the stairs, sacks of the stuff. There is always more to these pickup deals than first meets the eye. She proceeded to steam up the place. First she scrubbed Victor down and then she washed her Arizona clothes in the bathtub and hung them about inside on tables and lamps and other fixtures.
Melba didn't like this intrusion. She sat in her chair sulking and chewing on something brittle, or munching rather. Dr. Symes, hearing the stir, peered out from his bedroom. He saw me and he waved a sheet of paper and he came over to join me on the couch.
“Good news, Speed,” he said. “Hold on to your hat. Mama has agreed to write a letter for me.”
“What kind of letter has she agreed to write?”
“A wonderful letter of authorization. It's a new day.”
She still refused to lease him the island but he had persuaded her to let him use the island in some ill-defined way. Or so he said. In fact, Mrs. Symes had written nothing. The doctor had written a legal-sounding statement on a sheet of Melba's crinkly airmail paper that gave him the right “to dig holes and erect fences and make such other improvements on Jean's Island as he may deem necessary or desirable.” It only remained, he said, to get the old lady's signature, and a notary public to witness it and to squeeze the paper with his plierslike seal.
Notarized or not, the letter didn't impress me much. “What about your financing?” I said. “The banks will want more than this.”
“What do you know about it?”
“My father is in the construction business.”
He read through the statement. “This would be enough for me. What more could they want?”
“They want to see a lease or a land contract. They want something that will hold up. Your letter doesn't even describe the property.”
“It says Jean's Island plain enough.”
“Maybe there's another Jean's Island. They want metes and bounds.”
“I don't believe you know what you're talking about.”
“Maybe not.”
“I've never believed it. I don't believe you know your ass from first base. I was closing deals before you were born. Mama owns the land outright and that makes her the principal. This letter makes me her agent. Will you sit there and tell me that the law of agency has been repealed?”
What he was groping for, I thought, was a letter giving him power of attorney but I didn't want to go on with this and antagonize him further. For all my big talk of finance, it was I who needed a loan, and a quick one. The doctor went to his bedroom and brought back the big pasteboard box. He pawed angrily through the stuff. “I'll give you metes and bounds,” he said. “I'll give you section, township, and range.”
The plan I had hatched while reclining on the couch was to take Christine to the Fort George for a seafood supper, leaving Victor here at the movie. It was an improper sort of business for a married man who was not legally separated but the idea wouldn't go away. An alternative plan was to get supper here at the church and then take Christine out for drinks alone, which would be much cheaper, unless she went in for expensive novelty drinks. I couldn't tell from the feel of things whether they had eaten supper here yet or not.
I asked the doctor cold if he could let me have another twenty dollars.
Instead of answering my question, he showed me a photograph of his father, the squeamish Otho. It was a brown print on crumbling cardboard. Then he showed me a picture of an intense yokel with a thick shock of hair parted in the middle. The boy was wearing a white medical smock and he was sitting behind a microscope, one hand holding a glass slide and the other poised to make a focal adjustment. It was Dr. Symes himself as a student at Wooten Institute. Young microbe hunter! The microscope had no solid look of machined steel about it, no heaviness, and my guess was that it was a dummy, a photographer's prop.
There were more photographs, of Marvel Clark with Ivo and without Ivo, of an adult Ivo standing by his roofing truck and his hot-tar trailer, of houses, cars, fish, of people on porches, in uniform, of a grim blockhouse medical clinic, of people at a restaurant table, their eyes dazzled by a flash bulb like movie stars caught at play. He showed me a picture of the Wooten Panthers, a scraggly six-man football team. A medical school with a football team! Who did they play? The coach was Dr. Wooten himself, and Dr. Symes, with his bulk, played center. But there seemed to be no picture of the island, the only thing I was curious about.
Suddenly the doctor gave a start and a little yelp of discovery. “Another one! I missed this booger!” It was a window envelope that had not been opened. He wasted no time in ripping the end off and shaking out a check. It was a monthly insurance check for $215 made out to Mrs. Symes. It was almost a year old. “Some of them go back eight and nine years,” he said, folding it and sticking it in his shirt pocket. “This makes thirty some-odd I've found so far.”
“Why doesn't she cash them?”
“She cashes some and she forgets some. People like Mama, they don't care whether an insurance company can balance its books or not. They never think about things like that. The Aetna books mean less than nothing to her.”
“What will you do with them?”
“What do you think?”
“Your mother will have to endorse them.”
“They'll be well endorsed, don't worry about it. That's no step for a stepper. And Mama will get it all back a thousandfold. This is just seed money for the first drilling rig. This is just peanuts. I'm talking big bucks.” He looked about for eavesdroppers and then lowered his voice. “There's a billion cubic feet of natural gas under that island, Speed. I plan to have two producing wells down by the first of the year. Do you think that's an unrealistic goal?”
“I don't know. What about The City of Life?”
“The what?”
“The nursing home. The long yellow house.”
Waves of confusion passed across his face. “Nursing home?”