“Do they have roof-garden dancing and a nice orchestra?”
“It's not that kind of hotel. How's your diarrhea?”
“I've got that gentleman turned all the way around. I'm excreting rocks now when I can do my job at all. Did you get your sweetie back?”
“I'm not trying to get her back. I'm trying to get my car back.”
“Well, did you get it?”
“Not yet. I'm working on it.”
“Taking to your bed won't get it. You need to get after it.”
“I know that.”
“You need to read Dix. You need to read Dix on how to close.”
“I didn't get very far in that book.”
“He tells you how to close a sale. Of course it has a wider application. The art of closing, of consummation. Master that and you have the key to the golden door of success. You need to let Dix take you by the hand.”
“I read the part about not imposing on people but I never did that anyway.”
“You read it wrong. It is
necessary
to impose on them. How else can you help a sap? Did you read the chapter on generating enthusiasm?”
“I read part of it.”
“Read it all. Then read it again. It's pure nitro. The Three T's. The Five Don'ts. The Seven Elements. Stoking the fires of the U.S.S.
Reality
. Making the Pep Squad and staying on it.”
“I read the part about the fellow named Floyd who wouldn't work.”
“Marvin, not Floyd. Where do you get Floyd? There's no Floyd in any book Dix ever wrote. No, this was Marvin. It's a beautiful story and so true to life too. Old sorry Marvin! Pouting in his hotel room and listening to dance music on the radio and smoking one cigarette after the other and reading detective magazines and racing sheets. Sitting on the bed trying to dope out his six-dollar combinations. That guy! Wheeling his sap bets for the daily double! Dix knew Marv so well. Do you recall how he summed him upââHawking and spitting, we lay waste our powers.' I was once a Marvin myself if you can believe that. I had the blues so bad I was paralyzed. Then I read Dix and got off my ass.”
“My money hasn't come in from Little Rock yet.”
“What's the holdup?”
“I don't know.”
“How long do you expect me to carry you?”
“It should come in today. I'm looking for it today. Anyway, you've still got my bonds.”
“I don't want any more of your bonds. I'm caught up on bonds.”
“It should come in today. I figure I owe you about thirty dollars.”
“How do you figure that?”
“It's about fourteen hundred miles from San Miguel. I figure sixty dollars for the gas and oil and other stuff.”
“How much for the motorized canoe ride?”
“Do you think I'm going to pay half of that?”
“People are careless when they're spending other people's money. That stuff is hard to come by.”
“It wasn't a canoe. It was a boat.”
“I have to work for my money. I'm not like you.”
He had sorted the memorabilia from the box into three piles on the bed and took a long brown envelope from one of the piles and waved it at me. “Come here a minute, Speed. I want to show you something.”
It was a new plan for Jean's Island. On the back of the envelope he had sketched an outline of the island, which was shaped like a tadpole. On the bulbous end he had drawn a dock and some rectangles that represented barracks. This was to be a nursing-home complex for old people called The City of Life. He and his mother would live on the island in a long yellow house, he at one end and she at the other, her bathtub fitted with a grab-bar. Together they would run the nursing home. He would supervise the medical care and she would minister to the spiritual needs. He anticipated a licensing problem because of his record but he thought he could get around that by registering the thing in his mother's name. And in Louisiana there was always some official you could pay to expedite such matters. He had also drawn in a nine-hole golf course. I didn't get the connection between the nursing home and the golf links and I asked him about this but he wasn't listening.
“A lot of bedpans and bitching, you think, but I'm talking about a seventeen-percent bottom-line profit,” he said. “I don't mind fooling with these old people. Never have. Put a halfgrain of phenobarbital in their soup every night and they won't give you much trouble. They've all got money these days. They all get regular checks from the government.”
“You've got quite a few buildings there. What about your construction money?”
“No problem at all. Tap the Feds for some Hill-Burton funds. Maybe float some Act 9 industrial bonds. Hell, mortgage the island. Roll over some short notes. I figure about eight thousand five hundred square feet under roof for the long house, with about six thousand feet of that heated and cooled. The rest in storage rooms and breezeways. Put your cooling tower down at this end, with about forty-five tons of air-conditioning. I don't say it's a sure thing. If it was a sure thing, everybody would be in it. But you have to go with the odds and you have two high cards right off in me and Mama.”
“Your mother said that island was dedicated as a wildlife refuge.”
“Have you been discussing my business with her?”
“She was the one who brought it up.”
“Jean's Island has never been dedicated in any legal sense.”
“I'm just telling you what she said.”
“She meant it was posted, that's all. No hunters and no trespassers. She doesn't know the difference. Why would she be paying taxes on it if it was dedicated?”
“I don't know.”
“You're mighty right you don't. Did you get the impression that she might be willing to come to terms on the island?”
“I didn't get that impression.”
“Not favorably disposed then.”
“She's afraid some woman will get her hands on the property.”
“Some woman?”
“She talked about a woman named Sybil.”
“What has Sybil got to do with it?”
“I don't know.”
“Sybil's all right.”
“Your mother doesn't approve of her.”
“Sybil's all right but she came down here and showed her ass is what she did. She ran her mouth all the time. I was disappointed. It was a misplaced confidence on my part. I should never have brought her down here, but it was Sybil's car, you see.”
“There was another woman. Your mother mentioned another woman named Marvel Clark.”
“Marvel!”
“Marvel Clark. Do you know her?”
“Do I know Marvel. My old valentine. Mama must be losing her mind. What has Marvel got to do with anything?”
“Is she one of your sweethearts?”
“She's a rattlesnake. I didn't see it at first. Mama told me not to marry her. She knew those Clarks. I didn't see it until we were married and then I saw it with great clarity. Even so, I miss her sometimes. Some little thing will remind me of her. Can you imagine that? Missing a coiled rattler.”
“I didn't realize you had a wife.”
“I don't have a wife. Marvel gave me the gate thirty-five years ago, Speed. She said she'd had enough. She said she would shave her head and become a nun in the Catholic church before she would ever get married again. She cleaned me out good. She got my house and she got a lot of Mama's furniture and she even had my medical equipment attached.”
“Well, there you are. Your mother is afraid she will get the island too.”
“Get it how? Not through me.”
He searched through the box and brought out an old photograph showing a thin girl in a dotted dress. She was sitting in a playground swing and she was holding a squinting child on her knees. This was the doctor's former wife, Marvel Clark Symes, and their infant son Ivo. Dr. Symes with a wife! I couldn't believe it. She was a pretty girl too, and not a floozie at all. And baby Ivo! Of course the boy was grown now; that picture must have been forty years old.
Ivo was a roofing contractor in Alexandria, Louisiana, the doctor told me, where Marvel Clark now made her home as well. He said he had not communicated in any way with her for more than twenty years. I gathered that he was also estranged from his son, calling him as he did, “a roofing thug,” and saying that he hoped God would let him, the doctor, live long enough to see Ivo in the penitentiary at Angola.
“I don't know what Mama can be thinking about,” he said. “There is no possible way Marvel could get the land through me. She has no more legal claim on me than does any strange woman passing by on the street.”
“I'm just telling you what she said.”
“The divorce was final. That bond has been severed and forever set at naught. Those are the very words on the decree. That's as final as you can get. How much more do you want?”
“I don't know anything about it.”
“You're mighty right you don't. Go look it up at the courthouse in Vidalia and then you might know something about it.”
I went to the window and watched the street below for Webster Spooner. I looked across the rusty tin roofs of Belize. I couldn't see the ocean but I knew it was out there where the roofs stopped. Dr. Symes asked if I would get him some medicine and some shaving gear. I said I would and he began to write prescriptions on scraps of paper. Downstairs I could hear some bouncy 1937 clarinet tootling.
“What is that?”
“What?”
“That music.”
“That's Felix the Cat. Mama loves a picture show. I brought her some cartoons and shorts when I was down here with Sybil. Felix the Cat and Edgar Kennedy and Ted Fiorito with his dance band. I brought Melba a thousand-piece puzzle. Mama loves a picture show better than anybody I know except for Leon Vurro. Listen to this, Speed. Here's what I had to put up with. I would be in that hot cabin in south Houston trying to flatten out those photographs with brickbats and Leon would be off downtown in some cool picture show watching
Honky-Tonk Women
or
Women in Prison
. A grown man. Can you beat it? I've never wasted my time on shows. Don't you know they've got those stories all figured out before you even get to the show? Leon would sit there in the dark like a sap for two or three hours watching those stories and then he would come out on the street just as wild as a crib rat, blinking his eyes and looking around for women to squeeze. Not Bella but strange women. Oh, yes, I used to do it myself. There is very little folly I have missed out on in my life. I never wasted my time on shows but I was a bigger hog for women than Leon ever was. Talk about your prisoners of love. Talk about your boar minks. There was a time when I was out almost every night squeezing women but I stopped that foolishness years ago. A big waste of time and money if you want my opinion, not to mention the toll on your health.”
Melba was sitting in her chair in the next room, the central room, and when the cartoon was over she went downstairs to play the piano. The children sang, their devotions passing up through this bedroom and on through the tin roof to the skies. Dr. Symes hummed along with them and sang bits of the hymn.
“This is not a feasible program,” he said, indicating the business downstairs. “I think the world of Mama but this is just not a feasible setup. Fooling around with a handful of kids. Don't take my word for it. Check it out with your top educators and your top communicators. What you want is a broad base. This is a narrow base. What you want is a healing service under a tent, and then when things go slack you can knock the poles down and fold that booger up and move on. Or a radio ministry. A telephone ministry would beat this. You'll never prosper on a deal like this. It doesn't make any sense. This is like old man Becker in Ferriday. Let me tell you what he would do. He would be in the back of his hardware store weighing out turnip seed at eight cents a pound, just busting his ass with that little metal scoop, the sweat just rolling off him, while people were standing in line up front trying to buy five-thousand-dollar tractors.”
He gave me some money and I left to get the medicine. There were amber nose deposits on the prescriptions. The old man left a mucous track behind him like a snail. I bought a razor at Mr. Wu's grocery but I couldn't find a drugstore that was open so I walked across town to the hospital, another white building. The nurse who ran the dispensary was an Englishwoman. She didn't believe those prescriptions for a minute but she sold me the stuff anyway, some heart medicine called Lanoxin, and some Demerol, which I knew to be dope, and some other things in evil little bottles that I suspected of being dope. It was all for a “Mr. Ralph Moore” and the doctor had signed his own name as the prescribing physician. I explained that he was the son of Mrs. Symes at the Unity church. He had also asked me to get him a dozen syringes but the woman wouldn't sell me any. I didn't press the matter. Babies were crying and I wanted to get out of that place.
Near the hospital there was a city park, a long green field with a statue at one end that looked new and not very important. There was a steel flagpole with no flag. The brass swivel snaps on the rope were jingling against the pole. A woman was sitting tailor-fashion on the grass with a sketch pad. I recognized her as the American girl who had been in the Fort George dining room. The small boy was asleep on a beach towel beside her. I waved. She didn't want to raise her busy hand from the pad but she did nod.
The service was over when I got back to the tabernacle. Mrs. Symes and Melba and a chubby Negro girl in a green dress were in the doctor's room drinking iced tea. The girl was helping Mrs. Symes stick paper stars in an attendance ledger. There was a Scrabble board on the bed and the doctor and Melba were playing this word game. He said, “The millionaires in Palm Beach, Florida, are not having any more fun than we are, Melba.” I gave him the sack of drugs and shaving supplies and he left at once for the bathroom. Mrs. Symes asked where I had attended church.