Wasn’t this a sensational disclosure? A bombshell? The doctor’s hopes all dashed? And yet he showed little concern. He was subdued, all right, but there was also a kind of monstrous jauntiness in his manner.
I said, “What about Jean’s Island?”
“She gets the island too,” he said. “There’s not a thin dime for me but there’s hundreds of thousands of dollars for Rae Lynn and her piano lessons. You can see where that puts Marvel. Right in the driver’s seat. Mama has now brought about the very situation she so hoped to avoid.”
“Then there’s nothing to be done.”
“I wouldn’t say nothing.”
“What then?”
“Let me tell you how it is, Speed. I need to be on the ground in Louisiana. All right? Nuff said?”
It wasn’t quite enough but it was all I was ever going to get.
Victor was asleep. Christine held him with one arm and she was sketching something with her free hand. She said, “How old was Meemaw anyhow?”
I said, “Melba just got through saying that her age was a secret, Christine. Didn’t you hear that about the tombstone?”
“I didn’t hear that. What was it?”
It wasn’t that Christine’s question was improper in itself but I thought she should have been paying closer attention to what people were saying. I had been thinking about the tombstone business all along, even during the more important will discussion, wondering at this posthumous vanity. What were Mrs. Symes’s fears? That cemetery strollers would pause before her stone and compute the age? Here, look at this one. No wonder she’s dead.
Christine tore the sketch from her pad and passed it around. It was a portrait of Melba with her hands clasped together on her lap in resignation. Christine may have been an artist, who can say, but she was no draftsman. The only thing she got right was Melba’s hair, the wisps. The face was misshapen and dead, a flat, identikit likeness with one Mongoloid eye lower than the other. But Melba herself was pleased, if not with the portrait, at least with the attention. She said, “You’re a fine girl, Christine.”
Dr. Symes came to his feet and stretched. He asked Melba if he could keep the aluminum cane and she said he could take what he pleased from his mother’s personal things.
“No, no, the stick is all. I have my lockbox and I’ll just take this stick along for support and protection. It will also serve as a memento, what is it, mori.”
“We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, talking like this, and poor Nell down there in the hospital struggling for her life.”
“She’s beyond the struggle, Melba. You can take my word for it as a physician.”
“I don’t know, Reo. You remember way back there when she had the incurable bone disease. The doctors just gave up on her. You remember they said she had to die. They said she would never rise from her bed. Five doctors said she had to die in three days. They wanted to give her a shot and just put her to sleep like an animal. And that was thirty-six years ago. I expect every one of those doctors is dead today.”
“Pneumonia, Melba. Aspiration. Pulmonary fluids. The infection is setting in at this moment and she’ll never be able to throw it off. I’ve seen way too much of it with these old people. You can take my word for it, church is out this time.”
He gathered up his lockbox and said, “And now if you good people will excuse me I’m going to the hospital and kiss my old mother goodbye.” He tapped my shoe with the cane and said, “Speed, behave yourself,” and he went away.
I had rebuked Christine for not listening and all the time it was I who had been asleep at the switch. Mrs. Symes had not yet expired!
A few drops of rain fell on us, big ones. Melba said the big drops meant that we could expect a downpour, along with violent electrical discharges from the sky. She caught a silver drop in her hand and closed her fingers on it and said it reminded her of something we might find interesting. It was a recent vision. She had seen Dr. Symes being struck down by a big truck on a busy American highway. It was night and sleet was falling on the expressway and she could only see him off and on by the headlights of the giant trucks as they hit him over and over again, tossing him about like a bullfighter.
As she spoke, the speckled insect hovered in front of her eyes in an annoying way. She slapped at it again and said, “Get out of here, you naughty bug!” She asked us not to divulge the grim vision to Dr. Symes if we saw him again, and she went inside.
There followed an awkward silence, as with strangers being suddenly thrown together. Then Father Jackie leaned toward me and said that Mrs. Symes was a good woman but she had no business baptizing little children, or anyone else. She had no authority. And she had no business filling their heads with a lot of Calvinist nonsense. As for Melba, he said, tapping one finger to the steel plate in his own reconstructed skull, she was a little cracked. She laughed at inappropriate times. She had once given a little girl a toasted mouse for her cat. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to invite further confidences from this fellow.
Christine asked me who John Selmer Dix was and I told her he was a famous writer. Father Jackie said he had read a number of Dix’s books and had found them excellent. He said he had always been fond of English detective stories, though he objected to the English practice of naming all the American characters Hiram or Phineas or Homer, and of making them talk in an odd way. I couldn’t follow that, and then I saw that he must have Dix mixed up with some other bird, with the vain grunts of some other writer. He asked Christine if she would like to join him for lunch at his cottage.
“Some of the guys and chicks from the Peace Corps are dropping in for a rap session,” he said. “I know you’ll like them. They’re really neat dudes. It’s a regular thing we have. Nothing fancy, I assure you. We just have red wine and cheese and crackers and other munchies and we kick around a few ideas. But don’t say I didn’t warn you! It can get pretty heated at times!”
Christine said she thought she would stay at the tabernacle and relax and visit with Melba and listen to the rain on the tin roof.
He said, “How about you, Brad?”
He thought my name was Brad! I recognized the polite afterthought for what it was and I suspected too that those Peace Corps people might have guitars and so I too declined.
Fourteen
MELBA WAS RIGHT about the downpour. There wasn’t a great deal of lightning but the rain fell and the wind blew. Wooden shutters were battened down all across town. Broken palm fronds and power lines had fallen to the streets. The electricity was knocked out early and all the stores were dark inside, though it wasn’t yet noon. I sloshed through the foyer of the Fair Play Hotel where an inch or so of water had already accumulated. Ruth was gone. Webster’s sleeping box had begun to float and I put it up on the counter.
I ran up the stairs and found a skinny stranger sitting on my bed. He was wearing heavy boots of a European design, with laces running from one end to the other. He was sitting there in the gloom writing in a spiral notebook. He jumped when I opened the door and he closed the notebook and shoved it under a pillow. This bird has been composing something! I had caught him in the very act of putting pen to paper and his shame was painful to see.
“What do you want?” he said.
“This is my room.”
“This is the one they gave me.”
“Where’s my suitcase?”
“I don’t know. This is the room they showed me. There was nothing in here. Are you checking out?”
“I didn’t think so, no.”
He was tall and yellow and fleshy around the middle, an ectomorph with a paunch. He looked to be an intelligent person. His stuff was packed in a rubberized cloth bag that was choked off tight at the top with a drawstring. He pulled it closer to him and rested one hand on it in a protective way. He saw me as a threat not only to his notebook but to his bag too.
I questioned him. He said he was booked on a Nicaraguan Airlines flight to New Orleans but it had been canceled because of the
weather. For the past few months he had been back in the hills prospecting for immaculite and jade and tail feathers from the rare quetzal bird. He was now going home to see his brother ride in a prison rodeo, and, if it could be worked out, he also wanted to attend the state fair. Then he would return here to his immaculite diggings and to certain jade-bearing stream beds.
“What is immaculite?” I said. “And why is it mined?”
“It’s a fine crystal that is used in precision optical instruments.”
“Is that it?”
“That’s it. That’s the story of immaculite.”
“It’s funny I’ve never heard of it. I wouldn’t mind seeing some of that stuff.”
“I don’t have any with me. I don’t have any jadeite or quetzal feathers either.”
The way he said it made me think he was lying. My clothes were soaked and I was dripping water on the floor. We had to speak with raised voices because of the rain drumming on the tin roof. The din was terrible and I thought of Christine, who was not often treated to a tattoo like this in Phoenix.
“I’m wondering about my things,” I said. “Did the boy or the woman take my suitcase out of here?”
“I don’t know anything about it. This is the room they gave me. I’ve already paid for it but if there’s been a mistake I’ll be glad to move to another room.”
“Look here, why should there be a problem about going to the state fair?”
“There’s not any problem that I know of.”
“I got the idea that there was some problem. It’s no great trick to go to the fair, is it?”
“The rodeo is in Huntsville and the fair is in Dallas.”
“Two widely separated towns then. That’s all you meant to say.”
“Yes.”
He was still uncomfortable from having been caught redhanded at his vice—writing songs or what?—and I could see too that our loud, expository conversation was distasteful to him, he just having come in from the solitude of the bush. The wind peeled back a sheet of tin above his head. The thing flapped up and down a few times and then blew away. It will be understood when I say “tin” that I am using the popular term for galvanized and corrugated sheet iron. A cascade of water came down on the bed and we pushed it to an inside corner of the room. Now we had to talk even louder because of the wind shrieking through the hole in the roof. But that hole, I told myself, will act as a safety vent and will keep the house from exploding or imploding under a sudden pressure differential. The floor heaved and the walls creaked. The frame structure was ill-suited for withstanding these violent stresses.
“I think this is a hurricane,” he said. “What do you think?”
“It’s certainly a severe depression of some kind.”
“Maybe we should go to another place.”
“All the other houses are just like this one.”
“The Fort George Hotel is fairly solid.”
“But don’t they say stay inside? Where you are?”
“I think we should try for the Fort George.”
“You may be right.”
He took his own sweet time in opening the bag and packing the notebook and tying it up again, in a special way. It was all something of an act, this cool manner we were at such pains to display to one another, but in fairness I must say that I was not unnerved by this convulsion of nature. The storm made a change from the enervating heat and it is not going too far to say I found it bracing—or much too far. I should say too that it provided a welcome distraction from my personal problems.
The Texas fellow carried his bag under one arm. His running gait was badly coordinated and funny, mine deliberate. He ran like a duck. Water was running in the streets, which made it hard to lift our feet. We moved in a darting fashion from the lee of one house to that of another. The black creek was backed up and out of its banks, whether from the heavy rains upstream or from the driven sea blocking its discharge, I couldn’t say, perhaps both. There seemed to be no pattern in the way the wind was blowing. It came from all points of the compass. The velocity was irregular too, and it was the gusts that did most of the damage. My concern was for the twisted sheets of tin that were banging about. One of those things could take your head off. Some of the roofs had been completely stripped, leaving only exposed beams and stringers. I saw a gum tree with its limbs more or less intact but every leaf blown away. It had a wintry look.
We didn’t make it to the Fort George. A policeman hustled us off the street into a fenced compound and put us to work in a sandbag brigade. The wire fence enclosed a motor-pool area behind the police station, and this was a scene of wild activity. Men were running about and Bedford trucks and Land-Rovers were coming and going through the gate. Most of the workers seemed to be prisoners. They had been turned out of jail to fill small sisal bags with sand and broken oyster shells. The stuff was piled up in mounds at a construction site near the garage bays.
There weren’t nearly enough shovels. The Texas fellow and I were assigned to the loading detail. We carried sandbags, one in each hand, and slung them up into the truck beds. They were then hauled away to build dikes and to weigh down the flimsy roofs—much too late, it seemed. A big black officer with a riding crop and a bullhorn was directing things. I couldn’t understand a word he said. They called him Captain Grace. He had a Webley revolver in a canvas holster on his hip. As befitted his rank, he was the calmest man in the yard.
Everyone had his job. Webster was there and he and some other boys held the bags open while the prisoners filled them. A third gang tied the tops with string and the rest of us were loaders. The rain swept across us in blinding sheets, and the sand, wet though it was, swirled about in eddies, stinging our arms and faces. We were working in the open but the chainlike fence provided some protection from flying objects. I had no opportunity to ask Webster about my things.
There were two white Americans among the jailbirds—a young doper and an older, heavier man. He was barefooted, this older fellow, as were all the prisoners, and he wore a knit shirt that was split on both sides from his exertions. He appeared to be the boss of the shovelers. They were hard put to keep up, there being so few of them, and he was trying to prod them on to heroic efforts with a lot of infield chatter. His team! He was digging like a madman and yelling at the boys for being slow and for not holding the bags fully open. I had noticed him early but he was little more than a noisy wet blur to me.
I soon made a pickup at his station and he said, “Wrong way! Wrong way! Get your bags on this side and go out the other way!” I had been holding my head down to protect my eyes against all the blowing stuff and when I raised it to get a look at this loud person I was knocked for a loop. It was Jack Wilkie! I spoke to him. He recognized me and waved me off. We were meeting under strange circumstances in a faraway place and there were many questions to be answered—but this was no time for a visit! That was what I understood him to be saying with his urgent gestures. He hadn’t shaved for several days and there were clumps of sand stuck to his copper-wire whiskers. He had to keep hitching up his trousers because he had no belt.
I went back to work and considered the new development. Someone called out to me. It was the skinny fellow from Texas, hanging on the back of a truck and holding to one end of a long wooden ladder. He had been shanghaied into a new gang, a ladder gang. His bag was stowed in one of the garage bays and he wanted me to keep an eye on it while he was gone. I nodded and waved, indicating that I would do so, message understood. The truck pulled away and that was the last time I saw that mysterious bird alive. His name was Spann or Spang, more likely Spann.
Three army trucks came through the gate and wheeled about together in a nice maneuver. British soldiers jumped to the ground with new shovels at the ready. Now we had plenty of shovels but there was no more sand. The army officer and Captain Grace conferred. A decision was quickly reached. All the small boys were left behind and the rest of us were herded into the trucks and taken to some grassy beach dunes north of town. T
he captain led the convoy in his blue Land-Rover. Jack and I were together and there were about twenty other men in the back of our truck. We had to stand. The tarpaulin top was gone and we clung to the bentwood frame members. I could see that I was taller than at least one of these Coldstream Guards, if indeed that’s who they were. We were flung from side to side. Jack punched out angrily at people when they stepped on his bare toes.
Captain Grace had made an excellent choice. This new place was the Comstock Lode of sand and I could hardly wait to get at it. The dunes were thirty feet high in places and were situated about three hundred yards from the normal shoreline, so we were fairly well protected from the sea. Even so, an occasional monster wave swept all the way across the beach and broke over the top of the dunes, spraying us and leaving behind long green garlands of aquatic vegetation. The sand had drifted up here between an outcropping of rock and a grove of palm trees. The slender trunks of the palms were all bent in picturesque curves and the fronds at the top stood hysterically on end like sprung umbrellas. None of the trees, however, had been uprooted, and I decided then that this blow, already falling off somewhat, was probably not a major hurricane.
It was a good place for sand, as I say. The only catch was that the trucks had to cross a strip of backwater on the inland side of the dunes. The water wasn’t very deep but the ground underneath was soft and the trucks wallowed and strained to get through it with a full load of sandbags. We were now filling them and loading them at a much faster rate. Jack took charge once again and whipped us up into frenzies of production. No one seemed to mind. The prisoners and the soldiers thought he was funny and the officers stood back and let him do his stuff.