Stars and Bars: A Novel

  “Everything OK?” It was Shanda standing at the doorway of her mobile home fanning herself with a magazine. She came carefully down the steps and teetered over in her high heels, like a soft-soled bather on a cruel shingle beach. Henderson pointed to the petrol tank.

  “No pet … No gas,” he said.

  “I know. Duane siphoned it out this morning. He said to tell you.”

  “Why? Good God. What’s he playing at?”

  “He din’t have no gas in his car.”

  Henderson put his hands on his hips and looked around at the scenery.

  “He took your spare too. He said you’d got all different types of French tires on your car. He’s trying to get them matched.”

  Henderson rubbed his eyes. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said.

  “Look, your jacket’s fallen on the ground.” Shanda bent down to pick it up, but, for some reason—her high heels and the disequilibrium of Freeborn Gage, Jr.—she fell over, giving a little squeal of alarm. Henderson helped her up. Shanda was giggling, and he wondered suddenly if she was a little drunk. Her pregnant belly bulged against his hipbone. It was soft and springy, in strong contrast to his own cast-iron gut. She put an arm on one of his shoulders while, wobbling on one leg, she attempted to adjust the strap of a high heel. Henderson stood there patiently, a reliable leaning post. He heard a car and looked around. Duane, he earnestly hoped, with two wheels and some fuel. But no: it was Freeborn.

  The car thumped to a halt and Freeborn bounded out, not bothering to shut the door behind him. Shanda gave a low groan—she was still struggling with her shoe.

  “Hi, darlin’,” she called. “Get your friends?”

  Henderson saw two suited, smart-looking men get out of the car behind her advancing husband. Shanda became bipedal. Freeborn’s ten spread fingers pronged fiercely into Henderson’s soft chest, bruising, and propelling him with disturbing ease back against his car.

  “Ouch! Steady on!”

  Freeborn now had a forefinger practically up Henderson’s left nostril. His large face loomed three inches away. Henderson had a close-up view of the fjordlike contours of his carved and clipped facial hair. What painstaking efforts it must require, the thought entered his mind, unbidden, to shave around those gulfs and promontories, those peninsulas and bays each morning—surely defeating the ostensible purpose of growing a beard in the first place, namely to rid one of the necessity of that tedious chore.

  “I fuckin’ warned you, scumbag!” Freeborn’s breath had a curious antiseptic tang. Perhaps the result of a judicious swilling of the mouthwash he peddled along with his medical wadding.

  “Come on,” Henderson said, hurt. “She fell over. I helped her up.”

  “You don’t touch her, heah?”

  “What was I meant to do? She couldn’t get up; she was like a turtle on its back or something. Helpless.”

  “You calling Shanda a turtle? Bastard!”

  Freeborn hit him in the stomach, and something terrible happened to his jammed intestines. He fell to his knees. Everything went red and fizzing for an instant. He heard Shanda scream. His vision cleared and he blinked away his tears. It hadn’t really hurt. How remarkable! He stood up unsteadily. He backed off. Pingings and rumbling were coming from his gut, like a dam about to break. He farted uncontrollably. Freeborn advanced on him rubbing his sore fist. There was only one thing for it now, Henderson calculated. Total panic. He turned and ran.

  Too late he realized he should have run down the road to Luxora Beach. He sprinted up to the trees at the park’s edge and looked back. Ungainly Freeborn lumbered after him yelling imprecations. More gainly Henderson dodged his swinging punches easily and ran back toward the house.

  “Stop him, stop him!” Shanda beseeched. Freeborn’s two guests looked on in open-mouthed astonishment.

  “Who?” Henderson shouted.

  “You, you!”

  Did she want him to stop, or stop Freeborn?

  Freeborn pounded up, his face florid, his breath coming in hoarse, phlegm-rattling gasps. Henderson looked quickly about him, then snatched a bamboo-cane prop from a flower bed. The large sunflower it supported keeled gently over as if in slow motion.

  Henderson held the cane in front of him. Left elbow on hip. Controlled relaxation: flèche attack, cuts to the head. Freeborn stopped abruptly, a look of puzzlement on his face. Shanda’s whimpering died away as they all contemplated Henderson on guard.

  Henderson flourished his cane, wiggling the tip at Freeborn’s face. Nobody moved. Then Henderson suddenly felt tired and foolish. He sensed the beginnings of a blush through his sweat.

  Freeborn turned away.

  “Get me a beer, honey,” he said and spat two or three times on the ground. He turned to his guests. “Gentlemen, let’s go inside.” With uneasy smiles the two men skirted Henderson and went into the trailer. Freeborn followed, and Henderson was left alone.

  He stuck the cane back in the border and attempted to right the fallen sunflower. As he picked it up, the great nodding head, the size of his own face, came away in his hand.

  * * *

  That afternoon, after a lunch of panfried nut rissoler and turnip slaw, Henderson went in search of Duane. Mobility was his chief concern now: he had to be in Atlanta in twenty-four hours for Irene.

  “He ain’t here,” said Alma-May. She didn’t know nothing about “no tires.”

  On the way back into the hall from the kitchen he met Freeborn and his two guests. There were no introductions. Freeborn ignored him as he ushered the two men up the stairs. Henderson assumed they were going to see Gage. He wondered what for.

  He went outside and made his way to a ramshackle collection of old sheds some distance away from the main house. Here he found the old black gardener who kept the grounds in order. Henderson asked him if he knew where he might lay his hands on a spare tire and a gallon of petrol.

  “Luxora,” the old man said. “Dr. Tire. They’s a gas station there too. You can get gas there.”

  “Thank you,” Henderson said, smiling politely.

  Returning to the house, he quickened his pace when he heard the dull throb of music emanating from Duane’s bedroom.

  He knocked on the door, failed to make out any reply and pushed the door open. The walls were covered with shiny posters of rock stars and sportsmen. There was a lingering fetid smell of unwashed, overused sheets garnished with a hint of ashtrays long unemptied. The noise of the music was immense and palpable. It seemed to stir strands of his hair. Four speakers the size of traveling trunks stood in the corners of the room. Bryant sat alone on the bed, cross-legged, smoking, bobbing her head to the rhythms of the drums. “Bryant!” he shouted.

  She looked around, got up and turned the music down. “What do you want?” she said.

  “I’m looking for Duane.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “I can see that. What are you doing here?”

  “He said I could listen to his records anytime I want.”

  “Well, he’s got two of my tires and a tankful of petrol and I’d like them back.”

  “I know. Cod, he’s only trying to help,” she said disgustedly.

  “It’s a funny way to render assistance. Why did he have to siphon my petrol?”

  “He’d run out of gas. He had to have gas to take your tires to try and match them. I said he could.”

  “Very decent of you.… Tell him to get it all back together by tomorrow morning. We’re leaving.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you’re leaving. I’ve got a business appointment in Atlanta. Make up your mind whether you’re going back to New York or Richmond.”

  Bryant said nothing. She took a trembling drag on her cigarette. Henderson noticed it was hand rolled.

  “I say, that’s not dope, is it?”

  To his utter consternation Bryant started to cry. She began to sob and sniffle. She sat down on the bed. After some thought, Henderson sat down beside her. He felt a disquieting damp
ness beneath his thighs; it was rather like sitting on a riverbank. He stood up.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to accuse you of smoking grass, or whatever.” Now she was pushing all her fingers repeatedly through her hair.

  “Ah, just go away and leave me alone, you …” She leaned over the amplifier and turned the music up again.

  With a sigh, and overlooking the implicit oath, he left the room. On the landing at the head of the stairs he encountered the sauntering figure of Cora.

  “Hi,” she said. “I hear that you and Freeborn nearly came to blows over Shanda. Very chivalric.”

  “We did come to blows. Or rather blow. There was only one actually delivered—American, too.”

  “But then you were going to play swordfighting, I hear.”

  “Self-defense,” he said, a little frostily. “Anyway, I’m off tomorrow. All done. All ‘through,’ as you say.”

  “That was quick.”

  Henderson explained that in fact it was slow. He then told her of the mysterious offense he had caused Bryant.

  Cora shrugged. “What do you expect? She’s probably finding it hard to come to terms with you as a father.”

  Henderson considered there was some rightness in that observation. He realized he treated Bryant as if she were a slovenly waitress in a restaurant, with hectoring aggression, rather than in any spirit of paternalistic goodwill. He had never felt at ease with her, and after that night in Skaggsville their relationship had acquired even less welcome contours.…

  He felt suddenly depressed at the thought of his impending marriage to Melissa. It wasn’t so much Melissa that he was reluctant to take on; it was the prospect of a lifetime’s tense and problematic contact with Bryant and metal-mouthed Irv that got him down. He pursed his lips. Then he realized that by some association of ideas—prompted no doubt by recollections of the view down Bryant’s pajama top—he was staring vacantly at Cora’s chest. She crossed her arms.

  “How old is Duane?” he asked. “As a matter of interest.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, really. Thirty-three, thirty-four, I guess.”

  “Thirty-three? Thirty-four?”

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “Good God.” He felt an obscure but powerful sense of worry. “I’d somehow got the notion he was seventeen or eighteen. Thirty-three …”

  Cora laughed unrestrainedly. It was the first time he’d heard her laugh, he reflected.

  “Are you going straight back?” she asked.

  “Not directly. I’ve got this business meeting in Atlanta first.” He wasn’t really concentrating; he was busy reconstructing his Identikit of Duane.

  “With Miss Dubrovnik?”

  “Who? Oh, yes. Yes.” He thought wildly. “I told you about it. It’s a problem of dating one of the paintings. I’ve taken Polaroids, close-ups … technical matter I’m not really equipped to deal with.”

  “So she’s some sort of genuine expert. Unlike you.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Is she Yugoslavian? That name—”

  “Yes. Yes, I think so. Originally, you know.” They stood and looked at each other for a beat or two. She doesn’t believe me, he thought. I wouldn’t believe me either.

  “You don’t happen to know,” he asked, “who those two men were with Freeborn, do you?”

  “Don’t you know them? They come from your hometown.”

  “What? Hove? Surely not.”

  “No, stupid. Roach City. They own a gallery in New York.”

  chapter nine

  HENDERSON clattered down the front steps and set off at a brisk walk for Luxora Beach. Although riven with worries at this new problem, he could still muster an intense frustration at having to walk miles to get to a telephone. It was like living in the Wild West, some frontier town in the 1890’s. The next thing they’d be telling him that the Indians had cut down the wires to make ornaments.…

  He glowered at Freeborn’s trailer and paused. Was it worth risking it? Would Shanda let him in if Freeborn wasn’t there? But what if he was? He kept on walking.

  He was drawn up again by faint cries behind him. He looked back, saw it was Alma-May and retraced his steps.

  “Mr. Dose! Mr. Dose!”

  “Yes, yes. Here I am.”

  “Got a message from Duane. He called Shanda ’bout ten minutes ago. He says he can get the tires for your car.”

  “Excellent. When?”

  “Saturday.”

  “But that’s useless.” He actually stamped his foot in the dirt of the drive. “I’m going away tomorrow.”

  “It’s them French tires, he says.”

  Henderson stroked his forehead with the fingers of both hands. He had strong doubts about this “French tires” excuse. Duane had probably pawned them to buy records. “This is madness,” he said rhetorically. “I arrived here on Sunday. My car has a puncture. Some ghostly figure volunteers to fix it. A week later it’s still out of action. Madness.”

  “What’s a ‘puncture’?”

  The walk into Luxora Beach took place beneath the full glare of the late-afternoon sun. Henderson arrived at Main Street in his now-familiar state of perspiration and irritation. In a petulant assertion of his own rights as an individual he decided to visit a gas station at one end of the street that—he had noticed previously—bore the sign DRIVE-THRU BURGERS. He crossed the railway tracks and the main road and made his way down the raised sidewalk to the gas station. A pickup and a car were parked outside the flimsy cage. A girl—blond like Shanda, bold makeup, gleaming earrings—leaned out of the window, talking to two other girls in a maroon car. They looked vaguely familiar: he had seen them—laughing—on his last visit to town. They all stopped talking as he approached. A straining extractor fan hauled thick air from the kitchen. There was a powerful smell of fried onions and cooking oil.

  He examined the menu.

  “A burger, please.”

  “Onions? Mustard? Pickle? Ketchup?”

  Affirmative on all four counts. He paid and the burger duly arrived: a gray ice-hockey puck in a mean bun, a brown ruff of onions and the sectioned knob of a gherkin poking out beneath it. He took a huge jaw-cracking bite. Oil dripped down his chin onto his tie. He snorted astringency from his nostrils. His eyes watered. Mustard and ketchup squelched between his teeth. Still chewing, he took a long draft of Coke. The girls in the car watched him in horror-struck curiosity. He might have been Neanderthal man wolfing the steaming flesh of a mammoth. Bliss.

  He heard the rap of knuckles on glass and looked up. Beckman sat behind the wheel of the pickup beaming hugely. I can’t escape this bloody family, Henderson thought, and wandered over.

  “Hi there, Henderson. Like our squirrelburgers?”

  Henderson managed a smile. “Just felt like some meat. I’m not really used to a vegetarian diet, you see.”

  “That ain’t meat, man.” Beckman gave a high, delighted laugh. “Or, anyways, surer ’n shit it don’t come from no steer.”

  There was, Henderson had to confess, a faint aftertaste now, the like of which he’d never previously encountered. A sort of renal gaminess, but somehow artificial tasting—as saccharin is to sugar—chemically engendered. He sent his tongue into the crevices and corners of his mouth. He pumped his saliva glands. He could not only taste it, it also filled his nasal passages, seeped along his sinus, like gas in a mine shaft.

  “It’s not squirrel really, is it?” he asked, in the sort of weak voice that pleads to have confirmed that a leg is being pulled.

  “Minkburgers,” Beckman grinned. “Weaselburgers.” He gave a hoot of laughter. “Stoatburgers.”

  Henderson dropped his cooling rodentburger in a trash can and gulped down his Coke.

  “Come and have a beer,” Beckman invited.

  Henderson said he had to make a phone call first but would see him in the bar in a minute or two. Slowly he made his way toward the post office. He now felt distinctly queasy. What with the current marmoreal state of his bowels i
t would probably be with him for weeks.

  He slumped into the phone booth and requested directory inquiries to provide him with the number of Monopark 5000. Then he dialed the hotel. A series of cheerful girl-voices booked him a suite for the following night. Would he like a suite with a whirlpool bath? Why not. This brought to mind images of mixed bathing with Irene and he began to feel slightly better.

  He gulped air. The prism wedged between spine and sternum had had its corners worn down like a pebble on a beach, and had shrunk to the size of a large cooking apple. He badly needed a drink to wash away, or at least mask, the taste of the burger, which seemed if anything to be getting stronger. He headed for the bar.

  There were about ten pickups and cars parked outside the bar. Inside there was a lot of raucous laughter of Cardew’s “heh-heh-heh” variety and much upending of beer bottles. He saw Beckman at the skittle machine and nervously made his way through the denimed throng, muttering apologies and bestowing edgy smiles. The machine was simplicity itself. A wooden ball was rolled down a chute—the direction and gradient of which one could alter—in an attempt to knock down the skittles. Those bowled over were rerighted by means of string attached to their crowns. The only mechanical device in the game twitched this taut whenever a skittle was floored.

  Beckman crouched intensely over the chute, emitting a holler of glee every time he knocked any skittles over. It seemed a strangely banal pastime for an elementary-particle physicist, Henderson thought, but maybe this was simply his way of unwinding after a trying session with the quarks and neutrinos darting quantumly around his lab.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” Beckman offered, after a few more games.

  They approached the bar. Two beers were produced, plus a glass (unrequested) for Henderson, accompanied by a look of condescending pity from the etiolated barkeep and curious glances from the relentlessly joshing good ol’ boys.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Beckman said comfortingly. “They think all you English are fags anyway.” He pulled at his own bottle. “So, how’s it going anyway?”