“I don’t have them now but I did have them. What is your doctor’s name?”
No reply.
“I want to have a talk with that bird. What is he giving you? Do you know?”
No reply.
“Do you realize you’re just skin and bones?”
“I don’t feel like talking, Midge. I’m trying to be polite but I don’t feel good.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“Yes.”
“With me?”
“I guess so.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“You just want to stay in the house all the time.”
“I’m not in the house now. I could hardly be further out of the house.”
“You don’t want me back.”
“Yes, I do. I’m hard to please too. You know that.”
“I don’t feel like talking right now.”
“We don’t have to talk. I’ll get a chair and just sit here.”
“Yes, but I’ll know you’re there.”
I found a folding chair and settled in for a vigil. An elderly fat woman passed by in the hall and Cecil grunted and directed her into the room. It was his mother. She had his supper in a plastic bucket. He glared at her for being late, a hurricane was no excuse, and he picked over the food and rejected outright some of the things in the bucket. I was surprised she didn’t know what he liked after all these years. Maybe it was impossible to anticipate his whims. They exchanged not a word. Cecil had no thanks for her and she was content to stand there and hold the bucket in silence and watch him eat, a slow, grinding business.
An unconscious old man was wheeled into the room and then a girl came by with trays of food on a cart. Norma drank some tea but I couldn’t get her to eat anything. The sick man in the other bed was snoring. I ate his supper. A nurse stopped in to take temperatures. She ordered Cecil to the nursery, where he was needed to clean up a mess. He said he was off duty now and was going home, addressing the nurse as “Sister,” though she wasn’t a nun. He and his mother left.
The nurse told me that Norma was slow in recovering because she would eat nothing but ice. She was dehydrated too, from a long siege of diarrhea. But there was no fever to speak of and no other signs of peritonitis. Weren’t intravenous fluids indicated, I asked, in cases of dehydration? At this implied reproach the nurse became snippy. As for the current plan of treatment, she said, I would have to take that up “with doctor”—not “with the doctor.”
I crumbled some bread into a glass of milk and every half hour I woke Norma and forced her to swallow a spoonful or two. Later, another nurse came around with some candles and asked that the lights and the fan be turned off so as to allow more electricity for areas of greater need. It didn’t matter to me about the light because the emergency generator was producing just enough wattage to heat the bulb filament a dull red. I missed the fan for its companionable hum. After the first candle burned out, I didn’t light another one. A small gray coil of anti-mosquito incense smoldered on the windowsill. The smoke curled about the room in a long tendril that kept its integrity for quite some time. I fanned Norma with a magazine when I thought about it. She asked me to stop waking her. I told her it wouldn’t be necessary if she would only finish eating the bread and milk and the little cup of yellow custard with the nutmeg on top. She grudgingly did so and then we both slept, I in my chair.
She woke me before daylight and asked for a glass of crushed ice. Ice at five in the morning! I got some ice cubes at the nursing station and chopped them up with a pair of scissors. Now she was fully awake and ready to talk. I suppose it came more easily to her in the dark. She crunched on the ice and told me about her travels with Dupree. I was fascinated. Her voice was little more than a whisper but I hung on every word. She could have been one of Melba’s psychic heroines, with eyes “preternaturally bright.”
What a story! What a trip! They had first gone to Dallas, where Dupree was to meet with the well-known radical photographers, Hilda Monod and Jay Bomarr. I say “well known,” although Norma had never heard of these people. Dupree had been in touch with them through a third party in Massachusetts, a fellow who had vouched for him, telling Hilda and Jay that Dupree had threatened to kill the President and was okay. He also told them, or maybe it was Dupree himself, that Dupree owned a shopping center in Memphis which produced a vast income that was now available to the radical movement. Hilda and Jay were eager to confer with him, or so they said.
But they didn’t show in Dallas, telephoning instead from Florida to say they would be delayed, that they were conducting a workshop at a home for old radicals in Coral Gables. Dupree was to continue on to San Angelo and wait. There was another hitch and he was told to proceed to Wormington and see a fellow named Bates. Bates was to put them up in his house. But Bates had not been informed about the arrangement and he refused to talk to Dupree. Bates owned a cave near Wormington in which the temperature remained constant at 59 degrees Fahrenheit. How this grotto figured in the overall plans of the radicals, or if it figured at all, Norma couldn’t say, and it must remain a matter for speculation. She and Dupree checked in at the motel. He paced the room and became impatient and called Hilda and Jay with an ultimatum. Either they stopped giving him the runaround or he would take his money and ideas elsewhere.
A meeting in Mexico was agreed upon, at San Miguel de Allende. Hilda and Jay were to take part in a seminar there with a visiting radical from Denmark. It would be a safe and quiet place to talk business. But they needed a car. Could Dupree furnish them with a car? Not at that time, he said, but once in San Miguel, on completion of a satisfactory personal interview, he would give them the keys to a Ford Torino.
So off they went to Mexico. Norma drove most of the way because Dupree wanted to polish up the presentation he was preparing for the two infamous radicals. He shuffled his papers and muttered to himself and ate candy bars and drank pink Pepto-Bismol from a bottle. He was very excited, she said, but he wouldn’t discuss his ideas on the new social order with her, saying she was too dumb to understand his work.
Why, at that point, did she not slap his face and come home?
“I don’t know,” she said.
She didn’t know! She knew he had threatened the President of the United States and that he was now involved in some other devilish political enterprise and on top of that he was making rude personal remarks, and still she hung around for more! Then I saw the answer. I’m slow but sure. I had read things and heard many songs about people being poleaxed by love and brought quivering to their knees and I thought it was just something people said. And now here it was, true love. She was in love with that monkey! I was amazed but I couldn’t really hold it against her. I knew she was puzzled by life and marriage, thinking the entire range of men ran only from Dupree to me and back again, and I couldn’t really be angry with her, in her pitiable condition. She told me later that Dupree had promised her they would be remarried “in a forest,” where they would exchange heart-shaped rings and some sort of on-the-spot vows. He had no shame.
Jay and Hilda limped into San Miguel a week late. They had been held up for a few days in Beaumont, Texas, after a tailgater had rammed their Saab sedan from behind, and there had been many subsequent breakdowns along the way. Neither of them drove, of course, and they traveled with three flunkies who handled all such chores. Five stinking radicals in a threecylinder Saab! Norma couldn’t remember the names of the flunkies. She said they wore small caps and moved about quickly like squirrels and smiled in a knowing way when they looked a person in the face. Jay and Hilda were polite to her but the flunkies made fun of her accent.
The conference was a failure. Jay and Hilda were upset to learn that Dupree owned no shopping center and had no money of his own and no intention whatever of giving them a car. Not only that, but he talked to them in a familiar way, as an equal or a superior, as one having authority, saying he wanted them to revise their entire program from top to bottom, incorporating, among oth
er things, a new racial doctrine. He showed them some provocative slogans he had written, for shouting. He even lectured them on photography. They couldn’t believe their ears! Norma said Jay Bomarr was particularly indignant. Since the Beaumont crash he had been wearing a rigid and uncomfortable plastic collar around his neck and he couldn’t easily turn aside as Dupree ticked off important points on his fingertips.
The meeting ended with recriminations and with Dupree’s papers scattered on the floor of the Bugambilia Café. There followed several empty days. Dupree walked about town with his dog. Norma had already begun to suffer from internal disorders and she didn’t range far from the hotel. I forced her to describe every bite she had eaten since leaving Little Rock, so far as she could remember. She became peeved and irritable as I hammered away at her but it was worth it in the end because in this way I was able to put my finger on the rancid peanuts that had started her trouble. Once the point was cleared up, I permitted her to go on with her story.
She said the radicals passed most of their time in a snack bar just off the square. Long-distance calls could be made there and Jay was a great one for the telephone. There they sat at a table all day, holding court before young admirers and taking their skimpy meals and conspiring lazily and placing and receiving numerous phone calls. One flunky was posted in the crumpled Saab at all times to watch the camera gear. The other two called themselves the Ground Observer Corps, and they moved around town and eavesdropped on conversations and then reported back to Hilda and Jay on what people were saying, the topics of the day in that particular place. Hilda, who had little to say, appeared to be the real boss of the gang.
Dupree stopped in once and tried to stare them down from the doorway of the snack bar. They turned their chairs around. He came back the next day and walked slowly through the place with his dog. He went out the back door and reappeared almost instantly at the front door again. The chow dog was now in on the trick! If the radicals were knocked for a loop, they didn’t let on and they continued to regard Dupree with a contemptuous silence.
The Dane never showed up but they had the “seminar” anyway, under some shade trees in a place called the French Park. Jay Bomarr opened it with his famous speech, “Come Dream Along with Me.” I had heard it myself, at Ole Miss of all places, back in the days when Jay was drawing big crowds. It was a dream of blood and smashed faces, with a lot of talk about “the people,” whose historic duty it was to become a nameless herd and submit their lives to the absolute control of a small pack of wily and vicious intellectuals. Norma said it went over fairly well with the young Americans and Canadians, judging from the applause. No Mexicans came except for the professor who was chairman of the thing. Dupree was there, standing at the front, and he heckled Jay for a while. He had a New Year’s Eve noisemaker, a ratchet device that he swung around. The flunkies took it away from him and carried him off in the woods and beat him up.
Hilda followed Jay at the speaker’s stand, to discuss her prize-winning photographs of “hermits.” That is the word Norma understood Hilda to say, though it may have been something else. Varmints? Linnets? Spinets? Harlots? Norma couldn’t be sure because Hilda was interrupted early by Jay, who had a disturbing announcement. Their thermos jug had been stolen. He said no questions would be asked if the person who had taken the jug would return same without delay. The appeal failed. Hilda tried threats. She said she was going to stop talking if the jug was not returned at once. There were groans of consternation from the crowd of young shutterbugs. The three flunkies made a lightning search through the park and turned up various objects but nothing in the way of a thermos jug. Someone offered Hilda a replacement jug of comparable size and quality. She said that wouldn’t do at all and she put away her lecture materials and declared the seminar suspended until further notice. Jay and the professor tried to persuade her to continue, promising a full investigation. She said it was out of the question. The radicals packed their visual aids and returned to the snack bar, there to await the collapse of the conscience-stricken thief.
All that is fairly clear. Norma told it to me in a straightforward way and I have made it even clearer in my summary. But she could give me no satisfactory account of the rest of the journey, nothing but tantalizing scraps. She couldn’t even remember when the idea first came up of going on to British Honduras. Dupree had told her it was an idyllic spot. She looked forward to her forest wedding there.
Then, she said, he began to behave “strangely,” and for her to make such an acknowledgment I expected to hear next that Dupree had been seized by nothing short of barking fits. But it wasn’t quite that. After leaving San Miguel he spoke to her through a small megaphone. She had asked him to repeat some remark—on just one occasion—and after that he pretended to believe she was deaf. He rolled a piece of cardboard into a cone and taped the ends, and he pretended to believe she couldn’t hear him unless he spoke through it, directly into her ear from a foot or so away. The memory of the farmhouse made her shudder. She was there for about four days and sick the whole time. Terrible things went on outside. The workers shot the cows and beat up Dupree and destroyed the water pump. From that point on he was impossible. He went into a rage when he caught her bathing in the washtub, using scarce water. He accused her, through the megaphone, of malingering, and he accused her of introducing worm pills into his food. He had some deworming medicine for his dog and he couldn’t find it. By that time the pain in Norma’s side was hardly bearable and even Dupree could see that she was seriously ill. He drove her into town at night and left her at the hospital, and that must have been the night he got drunk and burned up my Torino.
What a story! Denmark! Coral Gables! But I was beginning to fade and I could no longer follow the details. Norma asked me to get her some more ice and I told her what we both needed now was not ice but a little more shut-eye.
The old man in the other bed woke at dawn. He woke suddenly and raised his head about an inch, gravity overtaking him there, and said, “What the devil is going on anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I truthfully replied.
He had one boggling, red-rimmed eye like Mr. Proctor. He wanted coffee and I went to see if I could find some.
Sixteen
RUTH HAD BOUNCED ME from the Fair Play without a hearing and Webster had taken my bag to a cheaper hotel called the Delgado, and told the manager there, another woman, that I was a model roomer in every way except for that of payment. She took a chance on me. There was no difficulty. I went personally to the cable office and wired my father for money and got it the next morning. The Delgado wasn’t as conveniently located as the Fair Play and had fewer amenities. The rates, however, were very reasonable.
I took Norma from the hospital in a taxicab and put her to bed in my room. The woman boss at the Delgado made a kind of fish soup or stew that was pretty good and I fed this to Norma, along with boiled rice. The English doctor had told me she could eat whatever she liked but I thought it best to be on the safe side and I allowed her no fried foods. I had to turn down her request for fresh pineapple too, it being so coarse and fibrous. After two days of forcing soup down her gullet I had her on her feet again, taking little compulsory hikes about the room. She tottered and complained. I bought her a shark’s-tooth bracelet. I read to her from old magazines until she asked me to stop doing it.
Mrs. Symes had slept through the hurricane. She herself was released from the hospital that same week, though she continued to be more or less bedridden. Christine and the girl Elizabeth attended to her. The stroke had left a slight paralysis in her left arm and a slight speech impediment. Still, she didn’t appear to be severely disabled.
“Another blast from Almighty God,” she said to me. I nodded, not knowing whether she meant the storm or the stroke. Christine was flexing the old lady’s arm and fingers so that the muscles would not become atrophied.
“Do you know why these things are sent?”
I said, “No, ma’am, I don’t.”
“Th
ey are sent to try us. Tell me this. Are the doors sticking too?”
“Yes, they are.”
“I thought as much. It makes it hard for us when the doors stick.”
“I was wondering if you would do me a favor, Meemaw.”
“I will if I can, hon. You see the sorry shape I’m in.”
“I was wondering if you would write a note to Captain Grace on behalf of a friend of mine. He’s in jail and needs some help.”
She had forgotten my first name and she asked me what it was. I told her and she told me once again that there was no one named Ray in the Bible. But that was all right, she said, Ray would do as well as any other name here on earth. Only God knew our true names.
Everyone was either sick or in jail. Melba was laid up in the bedroom with the brown picture on the wall. There had been nothing really wrong with her at the hospital but when she came out of her trance in the emergency room she got up and walked home and it was this unaccustomed trek across town that had put her under. So she was in bed too, for the first time in years, and Christine had her hands full, what with all the cooking and nursing. Brave Christine! The girl Elizabeth was a good worker too, and Victor was a useless whiner. I asked him why he didn’t go outside and play and get out of Christine’s hair and he said a chicken had pecked him on the street.
I did what I could, at the urging of Mrs. Symes, to find out what had happened to the doctor. I inquired at the bus station and the airport and the consular office. I took another look at the dead bodies in the hospital, where I saw poor Spann, his busy pen stilled forever. I inquired at the Shell station and the Texaco station. I talked to fishermen. When I visited Jack in jail, I looked over all the prisoners. Of course I had my eye out for Dupree too. I thought there was an excellent chance he might have been arrested again, for one thing or another. I found no trace of either of them. Mrs. Symes said she had a strong feeling that Reo was dead, cut off abruptly in his sins. Melba said no, he was still very much alive and she knew it in her bones. I found Melba’s hunch the more convincing of the two.