The Sound and the Furry (29 page)

“Look pretty much identical to me,” Bernie said. “But one’s good and one’s a piece
of crap, although that quote is hearsay from Duke, which is like piling crap on crap.”

I smelled no crap in the vicinity, none at all, which was actually kind of unusual.
Piles of crap would not be something I’d miss. But I believed in Bernie. Crap had
to be just around the corner.

“We’ll put a black
M
on this one,” Bernie said, taking a couple of felt pens from a jar on the counter,
“meaning we found it at Mack’s, and a red
R
for Ralph on the new one.” He raised the pipes one at a time, peering in them like
they were spyglasses, spyglasses being something I knew from our pirate-movie-watching
period, which had come after our outer-space-movie period and before one of our many
Western-movie periods. Westerns were Bernie’s favorite, and mine, too, on account
of—

“Whoa!” Bernie said. He turned the red-marked pipe this
way and that, squinting into it from different angles. “Something’s taped in there?
Like a . . .” He opened a drawer, took out a long skewer, the kind for doing shrimp
on the barbie, and poked around inside the red-marked pipe. After a moment or two,
out fell a small square of folded paper with some torn-off tape across the top. “. . . a
note?” Bernie’s voice went real quiet.

He sat down at the table, carefully unfolded the small square, ending up with a sheet
of paper the same size as what we had in the printer back home—jammed for what Bernie
said was the last time and now in pieces in the recycling bin, but forget that last
part. Standing beside Bernie, I could make out markings on the page; other than that,
I had nothing to contribute.

“X cubed plus 314Y to the . . . and all in a square bracket that . . . forgotten what
the sideways squiggly thing . . .” His voice trailed off. “Math, big guy,” Bernie
said. “Math, math everywhere and not a drop to drink,” he added, losing me completely.
“Who’s good at math?” Or something like that: in my already completely lost state
I maybe wasn’t paying the closest attention.

Meanwhile, Bernie had pulled out his phone, was tapping at the keys. “No service?”
He gave the phone a little smack. Bernie was only human—only human being one of my
favorite human expressions—and humans had a habit of smacking their machines around.
The machines never smacked them back. I’d seen some very tough guys who did the same
thing, just taking it and taking it until their moment came around.

We got in the car and drove down one rutted road and up another, Bernie checking the
phone screen from time to time. “Here we go,” he said, pulling over. A blob of bird
crap fell from the sky and landed on the hood. Crap: just around the corner, making
Bernie right again.

“Hey, Prof,” he said. “Bernie Little here.”

Prof ! We had lots of experts for this and that—Otis DeWayne when it came to weapons,
for example—and Prof down at Valley College was our money expert. I didn’t get to
see Prof enough. He had a big round belly that was always making interesting sounds
and also jiggled when he laughed, which was often, but his eyes were smart and watchful;
kind of like Cleotis’s, which might have come up already.

Prof’s voice sounded through the speakers. “Hi, Bernie. I’ve been meaning to call
you.”

“What about?”

“That router company I recommended in March,” Prof said. “Had a nice run-up, but now
it’s time to cash out and take your profits.”

“Uh,” Bernie said, “I never pulled the trigger on that.”

“No? Next you’ll be telling me you took a flyer on that tequila start-up instead.”

Bernie said nothing. The tequila start-up? Something about making tequila from this
special weed that grew on landfills? I kind of remembered a woman from the company
coming over to the house and giving Bernie a taste.

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink,” Prof said, which couldn’t
be truer in my experience. Horses were prima donnas and making them do just about
anything was impossible. “Any point in giving you another tip, Bernie?”

“Not at the moment,” Bernie said. “How’s your math?”

“Adequate for my purposes,” said Prof.

“I’ve got a bunch of equations here—mind taking a look at them?”

“They don’t teach math at West Point?”

“They do,” Bernie said, “but I don’t seem to have retained it.”

“That’s because your life is overbalanced into the physical world. Proust hardly ever
left his cork-lined bedroom.”

Sounded pretty suspicious to me. I made what Bernie calls a mental note. Proust: possible
perp, an orange jumpsuit most likely in his future.

“Can you just take down these numbers?” Bernie said.

“I’ll have to go over to the desk.” Then came a grunt, which would be Prof getting
off the couch in his office, a very comfortable leather couch I’d tried out once myself.
“Okay, shoot.”

Bernie held the sheet of paper up to the light and started reading to Prof. So nice
to hear Bernie’s voice. As for whatever he was actually saying, you tell me.

“I’ll get back to you,” Prof said, just as my eyelids were getting heavy.

I had a quick nap, one of my very quickest, and then we were pulling up to the dock.
Another car was waiting. The door opened and Vannah jumped out. She came running over,
kind of stumbling in her high heels, like she might topple over any second.

“You bastard!” she yelled. “You’re the one who found him and you didn’t even tell
me! I had to hear it from some goddamn coldblooded cop.”

“Um, sorry,” Bernie said. “I got caught up and—” He cut himself off. “My apologies,”
he said. “And I’m sorry for the loss of your brother.”

She gazed at Bernie, wobbling back and forth a bit, breathing deeply. Vannah wore
a very short skirt and a very little top. Bernie did the best job I’d ever seen him
do of keeping his gaze on a mostly naked woman’s face.

“And now Lord’s missing, too?” Vannah said.

“I’m afraid so,” Bernie said.

Her eyes misted over. Was she going to burst into tears? That often came next, but
from Vannah? I kind of doubted it, on account of her face, beautiful, yes, but also
kind of tough from certain angles, and—

Vannah burst into tears. She threw herself into Bernie’s arms. “I’m scared, so scared.”

Bernie patted her back. “Now, now,” he said, and added, “there, there.”

She buried her face on his shoulder, which muffled her crying and also her voice.
“Let me stay here with you, oh don’t say no.” Was that what she said? I couldn’t be
absolutely sure.

“Ah, um, well . . .” said Bernie. And then I was.

S
ometimes a kind of tension springs up between a man and a woman. It’s a snap to pick
up, since right away—actually even before—they both start smelling different. I began
picking up the tension during dinner that night—tuna sandwiches for them, kibble for
me—and it got stronger around bedtime. For sleeping quarters on
Little Jazz
we had a real bed in the bedroom section toward the bow, and a padded bench that
turned into a bed in the living room part. After some back-and-forth, Bernie got Vannah
to sleep in the bedroom, and he took the padded bench.

“A gentleman, huh?” she said. “Haven’t run into many of them.” A gentleman was a dude
who wore a coat and tie, and Bernie was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that night—the one
with the coconuts-with-straws-sticking-out-of-them pattern—so I didn’t quite catch
Vannah’s drift. Plus she hadn’t seen many dudes in coat and ties? They’re all over
downtown in the daytime.

I started the night on the floor right next to the padded bench, moved out onto the
stern deck and watched the moon for a while, returned to my spot near the padded bench.
Bernie was muttering a bit, not having one of his best sleeps. “On the other hand,”
he
said, and later, “if only,” both bad signs. I wriggled around, got even more comfortable
than I already was, and readied myself for some nice dreams, maybe chasing fat javelinas
in the canyon behind our place on Mesquite Road or exploring the inside of Iggy’s
house with Iggy beside me, an adventure that had really happened once in waking life,
a fun day to the max and nothing to feel bad about ever since old Mr. Parsons told
Bernie it had nothing to do with Mrs. Parsons ending up back in the hospital. But
in that fuzzy time when my eyes were closed but dreams hadn’t quite arrived, I heard
light, barefooted steps approaching.

My eyes opened but I already knew who it was. Vannah moved through a thin stream of
moonlight flowing through one of those little round windows. She wore a T-shirt and
that was it, a T-shirt you couldn’t call longish. Normally, I wouldn’t let anyone
near Bernie while he slept, so why wasn’t I on my feet, getting between them, maybe
throwing in a growl or two? No clue! No clue excepting her hands were empty and just
from the way she moved, I knew she meant Bernie no harm. I lay stretched out and motionless
on the floor, actually incapable of movement myself, as though I was asleep, and I
sort of did feel asleep, but with open eyes.

Vannah stood over the bed. Moonlight shone on her face. She looked a lot older by
moonlight, at least to me. Bernie’s bare shoulder was sticking up out of the covers.
The moonlight caught his shoulder, too, making it like stone. But Bernie wasn’t stone,
was a flesh-and-blood man, his strong chest rising and falling as he breathed. Vannah
reached for his shoulder, ran her hand along it, pulled back the covers, swung her
leg up on the bed.

Bernie’s eyes snapped open. “Vannah?” he said, sitting up real fast, the way Bernie
could move if he had to. “What’s going on?”

“Take a wild guess,” she said. She laughed a low, gurgly laugh.
“The wilder the better.” She lowered her face to his. Bernie’s mouth opened and closed,
no sound coming out. Their lips were just about touching. At that moment, his gaze
shifted and went to me, lying on the floor. He seemed to be looking me right in the
eyes. I did the same thing to him, no seeming about it. His expression changed, hard
to explain how, almost like he’d given himself a good shake. He held up his hand to
Vannah.

“No,” he said.

“No what?” she said. “No wildness? Strictly vanilla?”

Vanilla? This was all about ice cream? Ice cream in general I can take or leave, but
vanilla I’d just leave. The possibility wasn’t even going to arise since there was
no vanilla on the boat, the smell being impossible to miss. So: I was actually a bit
lost.

Bernie put his hand on Vannah’s arm, didn’t exactly push her, more like held her off.

“I appreciate the ah, um,” he said. “But it’s not a good idea.”

“How do you know?” Vannah said. “We haven’t gotten to the ah, um yet.”

Yes, this was impossible to follow. I closed my eyes.

“I have a girlfriend,” Bernie said.

“You do?”

“I tried to tell you on the phone. We got cut off.”

“How about pretending you don’t,” Vannah said, “and I’ll do some pretending of my
own? I can keep a secret, and I’m sure you can, too.”

“Yeah,” Bernie said, “but I couldn’t keep it from myself.”

There was a silence, a still moment or two, and then all that tension I’d been feeling
in the boat started fading fast. There was no more talk. Vannah’s bare footsteps went
padding back to the bedroom. Everybody settled down for a nice sleep. Bernie says
that sleep knits up torn sleeves, or something like that, although
none of us on
Little Jazz
had on any sort of sleeves at the moment. I wasn’t even wearing my collar! I thought
about my collar for a while. Then I rose and took a little turn on the stern deck,
sticking my nose over the side and sniffing the bayou: no trace of Iko. Not that I
was afraid of Iko, not in the slightest. Don’t think that for a moment. I returned
to my spot near Bernie and plunged right into dreamland.

Bacon! There are smells in dreams, at least the way we dream them in the nation within.
Sometimes I have dreams that are smells and smells only. Does that happen to you?
I kind of doubt it, no offense.