“ â
Can you help us, Captain Donahue?' he cried. âYes, Major,' came the stout reply, âmy men are fresh and they are just the fellows for that work!
'”
Leet laughed. I snatched the tape from the machine. “That's mine too, Leet.” The sudden noise had made the insects stop their racket for a moment but they were soon at it again.
I drove away in the Buick, not deigning to sell it, and I put the whole thing out of my mind, as though Leet had never been cast upon this shore with his fat fingers. I thought instead of Christine and her wet hair. I speculated on squeezing her, and more, being married to her, our life together in Vermont. She was a very good-natured girl. Resourceful too. Would she have to go to the doctor a lot? They all seemed to collapse right after the vows, even the robust ones like Christine. Female disorders. There are one or two points on female plumbing that I have never been clear on. And yet there was Mrs. Symes, in the pink for her age, and Otho in his grave these many years. But what would Christine and I talk about on long drives, or even on short ones? And what about Victor? Turn him over to Dean maybe. Pack all his little shirts and trousers and socksâdoll socks!âin a box and send him to Dean. Tag him for Phoenix and put him on an express bus. Then Christine and I could have our own son, little Terry, a polite child, very nimble and fast on his feet.
I passed a sandy turnoff with a sign that said “TO THE BEACH” or something like that, and I fixed the location in my mind. I would take Christine there, to that very spot, for a night swim. It was just the kind of thing that would appeal to her, a moonlight swim. Perhaps Melba would make us some sandwiches. We would go in the van. If that van could talk! I would teach her how to swim in the luminous sea. She probably thought she would die if she put her face under water.
When I drove up to the church, a jeep was pulling away and Christine was in it. She shouted something back to me. The driver was a bearded man in a monk's robe and a planter's straw hat. One of his sandaled feet was cocked up on the floor sill of the jeep in swaggering G.I. Joe fashion. I waved and called after them but they didn't stop, my voice never having arrested anything in flight.
The movie had started. The chapel was packed with excited boys and I could hardly get in the door. I had always liked Tarzan well enough but I didn't see why this white lord of the jungle should be such a favorite with Negroes. Their own people were shown in these films as jabbering and rolling their eyes and dropping their packages and running away at the first sign of trouble. For solid action give me a submarine picture or a picture that opens with a DC-3 having engine trouble over a desert. I pushed my way through to the projector table where Mrs. Symes was leaning on her aluminum cane. The boy Victor was sitting there on her stool, hunched forward and looking like Jack Dempsey. He had been into Mrs. Symes's paper stars and he had stuck one on each of his fingernails.
Sweat was trickling down the poor old lady's powdered cheeks. She was trembling from the heat and intensity in the room. She was wearing a long black dress for the occasion and some pearl devices on her earlobes. The old projector clattered away, Father Jackie not having seen fit to bring along his deluxe machine. The lip movements on the screen were just a beat or so behind the voices.
I told Victor to get up and let Mrs. Symes have the seat. He made a move but she said no, she would rather stand. There was a bright green fly on her veined hand and she didn't seem to feel it. The fly was so still and so cleanly articulated that it didn't look quite real; it looked like something from a jewelry shop or a joke shop.
“Christine wants you to look after Victor,” she said to me.
“Look after Victor?”
“She's gone with Father Jackie.”
“I don't follow.”
“Father Jackie wanted to show her the coconut dolls at the folk art center.”
“At night? How long will that take?”
“She wants you to look after Victor till she gets back.”
“I can't look after Victor.”
“I'm busy, Mr. Midge. It's too hot to talk. I'm trying to watch this, if you don't mind.”
“What about Father Jackie's mother? You said she was here. Why can't she look after him?”
“I'm trying to watch this.”
It was an old Tarzan picture I had somehow missed on television. He seemed to be in the Coast Guard this time. He was patrolling the bayous of Louisiana in his cutter and he was having trouble with Buster Crabbe, who was some sort of Cajun poacher or crook. They were squabbling over the same sweetheart too, and the girl didn't know what to do. She had the foolish notion that she might be able to reform Buster Crabbe. Everyone was addressing Johnny Weissmuller as “Dave” or “Skipper” instead of Tarzan. A clever wrinkle, this undercover business, but we were all impatient for him to shed his uniform and go into some Tarzan action with vines and big cats and crocodiles. It seemed to me they were putting it off too long.
The boys had settled down by the time Mrs. Symes changed the reel. Some were asleep. I saw Webster Spooner standing against the wall, rocking slowly like a small bank guard, his hands behind his back. It was hot and close in that room and I had no place to sit. I was hungry too. I wanted to flee but I was stuck with Victor. Look after Victor! If the kid broke his arm or got sick or run over by a truck, it would all be my fault! Maybe I could get Webster to act as a companion and relieve me of some of the burden.
The show droned on and the boys began to stir and mutter. Before the second reel was done, one of them stood up in the life-giving radiance from the projector and said, “This don't be Tarzan, Meemaw.”
“It is too,” she said. “Sit down.”
But it wasn't. It was just Johnny Weissmuller in the Coast Guard and not even at war. We could watch this thing all night and he wasn't going to stop being Dave. Father Jackie had a full bag of tricks!
The boys began to drift out in twos and threes and the door monitor made no effort to stop them. I asked Victor if he wanted to leave too. He seemed to be drugged, stupefied. I caught Webster as he was making his way to the door.
“How are you tonight, Webster?”
“Meemaw is vexed.”
“I know. Here, I want you to meet Victor Walls. Victor, give me your attention for a minute. This is Webster Spooner, a friend of mine. He's the bell captain at my hotel. I have a job to do and I want you boys to help me.”
“What kind of job?”
“An important job. We're going for a drive.”
Both of them rode in the front seat. I stopped at the Fair Play and told them to wait in the car while I went to my room and put on my boots. Ruth was gone. I went behind the desk and poked around to see if anything had come in for me. I opened the shoebox and found the message to my father, with the money still pinned to it. Ruth had never sent it to the cable office. All my letters were there too, the British Honduras covers I had addressed to myself in Little Rock. What a hotel!
I unpinned the money and took it with me upstairs and searched my room for boots. They were not in the suitcase and they were not under the bed. Where could they be? There was no other place in this bare cube of a room where black engineer's boots might be concealed. A dog, I said to myself. Some town dog has nosed open the door here and carried off my boots in his mouth. But both boots? Could a dog manage that? Two trips maybe. Or two dogs. But had I in fact ever seen a dog in the hotel? No. Not counting the foyer where they sometimes gamboled and fought around Webster's box. I had never seen a dog on the stairs or in the hallway. Then it came to me with a swelling rush that I didn't own a pair of black engineer's boots either, or any other kind of boots.
Next door I could hear a heavy person walking back and forth on the creaking boards. Karl, perhaps, pondering his next move, whetting his knife and pacing, trying to decide whether to buy a new radio or get the old one repaired, the old tube set that had served him so well in so many different rooms. I felt a visceral twinge of pain, lungs maybe, and I sat down on the bed to wait for it to pass. The pain was concentrated in one burning spot about the size of a dime. I wondered if I might have been hit by a small stray bullet sometime during the afternoon. I had handled news accounts of men who had been shot and then walked about for hours, days, a lifetime, unaware of such wounds. Maybe the heart itself. I took the last of the orange pills, first blowing off the pocket lint. Downstairs the boys were honking the horn.
Twelve
I
DROVE WITH CARE on Bishop Lane. The shadows were deceptive under the headlights and it was hard to tell the big holes from the little holes. I soon became fatigued from making so many judgments, half of them wrong, and so I gave up making them, or rather, acting on them, and I hit the holes as they came, without regard to width or depth.
Victor had shaken off his grogginess in the night air. After each violent jolt he would shout, “Good deal, Lucille!” and Webster would laugh. Victor fiddled with all the knobs too, and he wanted to know why things didn't work, the dash lights and the radio.
He said, “How much will this thing do, hey? What kind of old car is this anyway? I hate it. You need to get you a Volkswagen where you can sit up high. My mom says Volkswagens are the most powerful cars in the world.” There was a sharp edge to his voice. The little Yankee had never been taught to say “sir.”
“It'll do plenty,” I said, and I stepped on the gas and we hit the creeks at high speed. Water shot up through the floor and the boys began to squeal and jump about. Now I was driving recklessly.
A catlike animal sprang into the road and then stopped. I saw his face in the glare and it looked almost human in that brief moment of indecision. He decided against chancing it, the full crossing, and scrambled back to his starting place.
“A fox!” said Victor.
“No,” I said. “That was a coati, or coatimundi. He's related to another animal that we know well. A very clever fellow who washes his food. He has a ringed tail and a black burglar's mask. Can anyone tell me the name of that animal?”
They weren't listening to me. We came up out of a creek bottom and topped a low rise and there in the middle of the road was a dead cow. I swung the car to the left, catching the bloated corpse with the right headlights. It was only a glancing blow and I didn't stop. Both headlights on the right side were smashed and the steering was further affected so that there was now almost a half-turn of slack in the steering wheel. The position of the crossbar on the wheel was altered too, from horizontal to vertical, and with this new alignment I couldn't seem to get my hands placed right.
“Webster?”
“Sor?”
“Who is responsible for removing dead animals from your roads?”
“I don't know.”
“One of those rib bones could go right through a tire at today's high speeds.”
It was more than I could do to keep the car in the narrow lane, what with the steering and the lighting problems. We swung from one side to the other, our progress describing a sine curve. Bushes slapped against the undercarriage each time we left the road. It didn't occur to me to slow down. On one of these swoops we hurtled through the Mayan clearing where the Indian brothers had retired for the night to their stone chamber. That is, I could see the glow of a candle behind the doorway curtain as we passed within inches of it, but we were in and out of the place before they could do much more than exchange apprehensive glances.
The end came a few minutes later. Webster and Victor were wrestling and crawling back and forth over the seat and one of them kicked the shift lever down into reverse, which, on this singular car, was on the far right side of the shifting arc. The transmission shuddered and screeched and quit before I could make a move, my hands being occupied with the wheel. The car coasted to a stop in a marshy place.
“Now see what you've done!”
We got out and stood around in the mud. The boys were quiet for a change. I would have cut a limb and gladly beaten them both but you always have to weigh one thing against another and I didn't want to listen to their bawling. They might have run too, the second one anyway. I could hear transmission fluid dripping and I could smell the odor of burnt sugar. There was another sound that I couldn't place immediately. Something unpleasant was disturbing the air. Then I figured out that it was rock-and-roll music and that it must be coming from the Indians' transistor radio.
I said, “All right then, we'll walk. It's not far now. There better not be any more monkeyshines, I can tell you that.”
“Where are we going?”
“We're going to see Guy Dupree.”
“You don't have no electric torch?”
“We don't need one. I can see at night. I can see stars down to the seventh magnitude. Just stay behind me and step where I step.”
Above the trees in the narrow cut of the road there was a dazzling band of stars. My eye went directly to the Clouds of Magellan, although I had never seen them before. I knew then that I would not be able to see the Southern Cross, not at this time of year. I had only a rough picture in my mind of the southern celestial sphere but I did know that the Southern Cross was very far away from those clouds, perhaps as much as 180 degrees. I pointed out the two galaxies to Webster and Victor, or tried to. They found the large cloud easily enough but I couldn't make them see the pattern, the luminous smudge of the small cloud, low in the south.
I said, “Can anyone tell me what a galaxy is? A little knowledge about these things can greatly increase our enjoyment of them.”
There was no answer, as before, with the much easier raccoon question. Webster asked me about a red star, not Betelgeuse or Antares, directly overhead. I couldn't identify it. “These are poor horizons,” I said, “and I'm not really familiar with these skies. Now here's something interesting. Victor and I can't see all those stars where we live. We have different stars, you see, depending on how far north or south we live.”