Another You (42 page)

“How have I been?” Marshall echoed. “This has been a very confusing year. I haven’t been all that well.”

“You haven’t?” Gordon said. Marshall could hear the trepidation in his voice. He drained his beer, his eyes darting to a lizard heading for one of the bougainvillea pots.

“I’m fine,” Marshall said halfheartedly. “I had a friend along on part of the ride. He was having health problems.”

“He try the Corona cure?” Beth said.

“No,” Marshall said. “As far as I know, he didn’t try that.”

“Hey, babe, how far ahead should I light those coals?” Gordon said.

“Better dump them in the barbecue first,” she said.

“Notice that I married a wise ass?” Gordon said. “I love her, though. Babe, tell him how we got the ceiling fans in the house.”

“No,” she said. “It’ll sound like bragging.”

Gordon shrugged. The bird shrieked again.

“Get away, you fucking asshole!” Beth yelled at the cat, racing toward the fence. She bypassed the beer bottles, stepped over Gordon’s discarded T-shirt, Marshall’s kicked-off shoes. “And stay away!” she hollered.

“Pretty boy!” the bird shrieked. “Pretty boy. Pretty boy.”

“Oh, my long-suffering ass you’re pretty,” Gordon said, picking up his empty bottle and throwing it into the yard.

“Gordon!” Beth said.

“Yeah?” he said.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Is it my fault if our friends the Rastafarians have a problem with picking up after themselves when they’ve been drinking beer?”

“Don’t do that again,” she said.

“Pretty boy, pretty boy,” Gordon said, puffing out his chest. He smiled at Beth. “How is it you think that bird lives through every night? You’re not awake all night long to protect it, unless that book you were reading on astral projection finally took.”

“All I know is I’ve stopped that cat from getting it approximately one million times.”

“She sends protective thoughts to it during the night,” Gordon said.

“I say a prayer for it. That’s all I do,” she said, handing Marshall a dish filled with nuts. The dish was in the shape of a flamingo’s head, nuts filling the shallow pocket of its beak. A bright blue eye stared up at Marshall as he reached for the dish. Gordon’s fingers dipped in. Some of the nuts scattered to the deck; others made it into his mouth.

“Here comes the part where he objects that I’m mystical, as he
calls it,” Beth said. “I meditate before dinner. Watch him make fun of me once I turn my back.”

A new tape was clicked into the boom box: the sounds of the sea, Marshall guessed. The sea, with chimes intermittently ringing. Marshall watched her disappear into the house, heard a door close behind her.

“She meditates in the Mary Kay room,” Gordon said. “You know what I tell her? That she’s in there meditating for money.”

“Pretty necklace she got from Evie,” Marshall said.

“Say what?”

“Her necklace,” Marshall said. “She said it was Evie’s.”

“That what she was wearing?” Gordon said. “Yes, very nice of Evie.”

Marshall waited, hoping he’d say something else. Finally, Gordon said, “Hey. How about some colder-than-cold beers? Friend of mine is tending bar tonight down at the Green Parrot. What do you say I light these coals and we duck out while she’s meditating?”

“Sure,” Marshall said.

“That all right with you?”

“Sure,” Marshall said again. He was slightly drunk and didn’t intend to drink more once he got to the bar, but he decided he’d go along for the ride.

“Hey, I can tell you all about the buyout,” Gordon said. “I got my hopes up.”

“This might really happen, huh?”

“Might happen. Yeah, might happen. If so, I’m going to think something from living with Beth rubbed off. She’s got the most amazing good luck of anybody I ever met, let alone a pretty woman. Women don’t have much luck at all, in my personal experience. Listen to them long enough, you’ll think no one woman ever had a moment’s luck, ever.”

“Yeah,” Marshall said. As he spoke, he wondered exactly what he was agreeing with.

“Okay, we’re out of here,” Gordon said. As he passed the boom box, he turned up the volume slightly. “I know just how she likes it,” he said. “Music, at least. The rest, you go figure.”

This seemed not to require a reply.

“You mind hanging on to the back of a motorcycle?” Gordon
said. “It’s not mine, it’s borrowed. I’m giving it back to the bartender. We can walk back.”

“How far is this place?”

“Across town, but town’s about as wide as the
Queen Mary
sideways. You know about the fish that saw the shadow of the
Queen Mary
’s bottom, right?”

Searching for his keys in a fishbowl of change on the floor near the front door, Gordon forgot to expect a reply.
If that’s the Queen Mary’s bottom, then God save the King
, Marshall thought. If someone had asked him for the punchline of the joke—that joke, or any joke—he wouldn’t have thought of it. Amazing, the irrelevant things stored away that could be tapped into, spontaneously.

The motorcycle was a big black Harley. When Gordon turned the key in the ignition, it sounded like something large exploding; then the engine settled into a burbling, growling monotony. Instead of a helmet, Gordon pulled on a baseball cap that had been stretched over the fake leopard-skin seat. Marshall jumped on and the motorcycle took off at a forty-five-degree angle, Gordon hollering something into the wind he didn’t understand. “When I lean, don’t lean with me,” Gordon said a second time. “Sit back there like you’re Queen Elizabeth on the throne. Sure ain’t gonna be Prince Charlie, all the trouble he’s gotten himself into. Whoo-ee!”

Gordon zigzagged between two cars, turned right on a red light after a second’s hesitation. “This is Truman,” Gordon shouted. It was the same road Marshall had taken into town, but he was experiencing it differently now. He decided to let out a big breath and trust Gordon’s driving skills.

“You see that
Saturday Night Live
skit about Prince Charles wanting to be his lover’s Tampax?” Gordon shouted. Every third word was lost in the wind. Gordon seemed to realize this. “Prince Charles. Camilla Parker-Bowles: Tampax!” he shouted.
“Saturday Night Live.”

“I did, actually,” Marshall said. He was slightly surprised that his brother remembered Prince Charles’s lover’s name. He hadn’t remembered that himself, though he did know what he was talking about: the woman gets a gift from the Prince and it turns out to be a Tampax with Charles’s head talking at the tip. Maybe everything and everybody was just fucking crazy. Maybe riding on a motorcycle with Gordon
made as much sense as anything else. Wasn’t that exactly what the recondite McCallum would do, hooting with pleasure? Sonja, herself—apparently she liked a wilder time than she let on.

The motorcycle veered right onto Whitehead, steeply banked as it cornered, a few blacks on bicycles looking up as the two men roared past on the big black Harley, one clinging to the other’s shirt as if it provided a secure grip, the driver hunched over, barrelling forward in yellow aviator glasses and a backward Mets cap, shirt billowing. He slowed for a red light, then coasted through, accelerating when he passed the intersection. “Oo-ee!” Gordon hollered. “Hate to return this baby.”

The Green Parrot was on a corner several blocks up: a big bar with open shutters and a deeply overhanging roof, specks of light inside from pinball machines and the lights dangling over pool tables. The wall art, Marshall saw as he climbed off and walked limp-legged into the bar, consisted of hand-painted beer bottles and framed pictures of parrots. The rectangular bar took up almost the entire room and was worked by one bartender, who did things faster than the eye could register them. “Hey, man,” he called, in greeting to Gordon. “You got my machine fixed, I see.” He raced to their end of the bar, setting down two open bottles of Rolling Rock and pouring two shots of vodka that slowly settled after he left like water calming in the wake of a boat. Gordon nodded, tossing down the vodka. Marshall did the same, tears springing to his eyes.

“So you tell me, man,” Gordon said. “Have we got the right life down here, or do we not?”

“Seems great,” Marshall said.

“Beth upsets herself about the place, though. Says the reef is a cesspool. Everglades almost gone. Hell, she won’t go into the Audubon House because it turns out he killed birds. She’s got quite a rant against Audubon. But luck? Does that woman have luck? She got four ceiling fans off the back of a truck in trade for her spare tire. No fuckin’ way you can figure out what that’s about, right? Guy driving a Ford pickup is getting gas the same time Beth is, tells her he’ll give her four ceiling fans in exchange for her spare. She didn’t even question him, man. She is some cool customer. You know her philosophy? It’s better not to ask. Which is a hard philosophy to argue with. Jackson!” he hollered to the bartender.

Jackson raced to their end of the bar. “I had a customer you
missed by ten, fifteen minutes. He was going to Paris to jam with Jim Morrison. Hope he likes playing music leaning up against tombstones—that’s what I didn’t tell him.”

“He doesn’t contradict a lot of ideas,” Gordon said to Marshall.

“Heard that, Gordo,” Jackson said, opening a cluster of beer bottles and racing with them in two different directions.

“He hears real good. But he doesn’t hear. You know?” Gordon said.

Jackson raced back. “What about the machine, man?” he said, pouring two more shots.

“It was nothing. Got it fixed in half an hour. My guy admitted it couldn’t count as repayment for his debt. Have it break down a couple more times, he might be even with me.”

“Gordon built this guy a brick courtyard,” Jackson said.

Marshall nodded appreciatively.

“Hey, this is my brother,” Gordon said.

“No shit. He’s your brother? Where you here from, bro?”

“New Hampshire,” Marshall said. The words stuck in his throat.

“Isn’t that where Jean Louise went the time she ran away?” Gordon said.

“Nah. Seattle.”

“She get that tattoo lasered off okay?”

“Nah, now she’s decided she likes it.”

“We going diving or what?” Gordon said.

“My ear’s still no good,” Jackson said. He pivoted to take a drink order, dunking glasses in soapy water, then clear water, putting them upside down on a towel to drain, reaching for drier glasses to squirt drink mix into, while scooping in ice cubes left-handed. “Gin tonic, vodka tonic, liiiiime for everyone,” Jackson said, opening two bottles of beer, grabbing them by their necks, palming slices of lime onto the rims, setting all four drinks in front of two people standing and two sitting.

“Is Beth going to mind if we’re not there when she’s through meditating?” Marshall said.

“Beth? No way. Beth’ll start ’em all over again, let the burned-out coals be dust to dust. She knows I’ll be home eventually.”

“So you really like it here?” Marshall said. “You think you’d retire here even if you sold the business?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gordon said. “Is that gonna happen? Am I
gonna sell that man the business? Hank’s not even sure he wants to be bought out. I expect if he saw it in writing, he’d change his tune. But retire here? I don’t know. I’ve heard Maui is pretty nice. For all that, I’ve heard Costa Rica can be beautiful.”

“Really?” Marshall said. “You’d think about those places?”

“Yeah, why not?” Gordon drummed his thumb on the counter-top.

“Guy down there’s a friend of the boss,” Jackson said, picking up their empty shot glasses, indicating with a roll of his eyes he couldn’t refill them again.

“His wife is gonna leave him,” Gordon said as they left. “Came to the wife or the motorcycle, I think I know which he’d miss most, though.”

“His wife, who went to Seattle?”

“That was the girlfriend,” Gordon said. “She got a viper tattooed on her butt. So I hear, anyway.” Gordon coughed a long, dry cough. His face was red, and there was a scar above his left eyebrow, pink and puckered. Off the motorcycle, Gordon looked suddenly smaller. He had gotten quite thin. Marshall felt protective; he was glad Beth would be feeding Gordon dinner.

“You remember that night Mom told us she was dying?” Marshall said.

“Shit, man, I knew you were going to mention that. Sitting in the bar, it came to me that that is exactly what you were going to ask about. I’ve gotten psychic since I’ve been with Beth.” He kicked a stone, stepping far to the left to do it. “What about it?” he said.

“Did you know that was what she was going to talk about that night? It just occurred to me that you might have known what was coming.”

“Well, Evie had told me she was sick, but it was the first time I’d gotten it from the horse’s mouth.” Gordon turned slightly to look at two girls passing by, both in short shorts and tropical shirts tied at the waist. “Jail bait,” he said. As they got to the corner of a more crowded street, Gordon said, “This is Duval. The main drag. We take you sightseeing when you were here before?”

“Yeah,” Marshall said. “We ate on Duval one night. At an outdoor place.”

“Claire,” Gordon said. “Closed. Became something else.”

“Good jukebox,” Marshall said. He looked at Gordon. “How did you do that to your eye?” Marshall said.

“Hit the fucking reef,” Gordon said. “She’s putting vitamin E on it. Healing it pretty damn fast.” Gordon pointed to something ahead of them. “This street we’re walking up. Faustos is on it. I’m always trying to get her to go out on the highway to shop, but now she’s a townie, she feels she’s got to be loyal to local establishments. Watch: she’ll say whatever vegetable she’s cooked came from Faustos.”

“I swear I won’t keep talking about this, but lately I’ve been thinking about that night, and some things are very distinct, but other things are blurry.”

Gordon looked at him with mild interest. Not because of the night, Marshall guessed, but because he was so intent on discussing it.

“Our father—he was outside? In a storm?”

“Overcome with grief,” Gordon said. “Didn’t you ever see
Wuthering Heights
on the tube? One of those old movies like
Rebecca
or whatever, trees blowing, clouds streaming over the moon. Cliffs. Stuff like that. The big house lit by lightning.”