“Will we have that?”
“Sure. We’ll have everything. You can make a wonderful one with wild strawberries. If you have a lemon you cut half of it and squeeze it into the cup and leave the rind in the cup. Then you crush the wild strawberries into the cup and wash the sawdust off a piece of ice from the icehouse and put it in and then fill the cup with Scotch and then stir it till it’s all mixed and cold.”
“Don’t you put in any water?”
“No. The ice melts enough and there’s enough juice in the strawberries and from the lemon.”
“Do you think there will still be wild strawberries?”
“I’m sure there will be.”
“Do you think there will be enough to make a shortcake?”
“I’m pretty sure there will be.”
“We better not talk about it. I’m getting awfully hungry.”
“We’ll drive about another drink more,” he said. “And then we ought to be there.”
They drove on in the night now with the swamp dark and high on both sides of the road and the good headlights lighting far ahead. The drinks drove the past away the way the headlights cut through the dark and Roger said.
“Daughter, I’ll take another if you want to make it.”
When she had made it she said, “Why don’t you let me hold it and give it to you when you want it?”
“It doesn’t bother me driving.”
“It doesn’t bother me to hold it either. Doesn’t it make you feel good?”
“Better than anything.”
“Not than anything. But awfully good.”
Ahead now were the lights of a village where the trees were cleared away and Roger turned onto a road that ran to the left and drove past a drugstore, a general store, a restaurant and along a deserted paved street that ran to the sea. He turned right and drove on another paved street past vacant lots and scattered houses until they saw the lights of a filling station and a neon sign advertising cabins. The main highway ran past there joining the sea road and the cabins were toward the sea. They stopped the car at the filling station and Roger asked the middle-aged man who came out looking blue-skinned in the light of the sign to check the oil and water and fill the tank.
“How are the cabins?” Roger asked.
“O.K., Cap,” the man said. “Nice cabins. Clean cabins.”
“Got clean sheets?” Roger asked.
“Just as clean as you want them. You folks fixing to stay all night?”
“If we stay.”
“All night’s three dollars.”
“How’s for the lady to have a look at one?”
“Fine and dandy. She won’t ever see no finer mattresses. Sheets plumb clean. Shower. Perfect cross ventilation. Modern plumbing.”
“I’ll go in,” the girl said.
“Here take a key. You folks from Miami?”
“That’s right.”
“Prefer the West Coast myself,” the man said. “Your oil’s O.K. and so’s your water.”
The girl came back to the car.
“The one I saw is a splendid cabin. It’s cool too.”
“Breeze right off the Gulf of Mexico,” the man said. “Going to blow all night. All tomorrow. Probably part of Thursday. Did you try that mattress?”
“Everything looked marvelous.”
“My old woman keeps them so goddam clean it’s a crime. She wears herself to death on them. I sent her up to the show tonight. Laundry’s the biggest item. But she does it. There it is. I just got nine into her.” He went to hang up the hose.
“He’s a little confusing,” Helena whispered. “But it’s quite nice and clean.”
“Well you going to take her?” the man asked.
“Sure,” Roger said. “We’ll take her.”
“Write in the book then.”
Roger wrote Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hutchins 9072 Surfside Drive Miami Beach and handed the book back.
“Any kin to the educator?” the man asked, making a note of the license number in the book.
“No. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” the man said. “I never thought much of him. Just read about him in the papers. Like me to help you with anything?”
“No. I’ll just run her in and we’ll put our things in.”
“That’s three and nine gallons makes five-fifty with the state tax.”
“Where can we get something to eat?” Roger asked.
“Two different places in town. Just about the same.”
“You prefer either one?”
“People speak pretty highly of the Green Lantern.”
“I think I’ve heard of it,” the girl said. “Somewhere.”
“You might. Widow woman runs it.”
“I believe that’s the place,” the girl said.
“Sure you don’t want me to help you?”
“No. We’re fine,” Roger said.
“Just one thing I’d like to say,” the man said. “Mrs. Hutchins certainly is a fine looking woman.”
“Thank you,” Helena said. “I think that’s lovely of you. But I’m afraid it’s just that beautiful light.”
“No,” he said. “I mean it true. From the heart.”
“I think we’d better go in,” Helena said to Roger. “I don’t want you to lose me so early in the trip.”
Inside the cabin there was a double bed, a table covered with oilcloth, two chairs and a light bulb that hung down from the ceiling. There was a shower, a toilet and a washbowl with a mirror. Clean towels hung on a rack by the washbowl and there was a pole at one end of the room with some hangers.
Roger brought in the bags and Helena put the ice jug, the two cups, and the cardboard canon with the Scotch in it on the table with the paper bag full of White Rock bottles.
“Don’t look gloomy,” she said. “The bed is clean. The sheets anyway.”
Roger put his arm around her and kissed her.
“Put the light out please.”
Roger reached up to the light bulb and turned the switch. In the dark he kissed her, brushing his lips against hers, feeling them both fill without opening, feeling her trembling as he held her. Holding her tight against him, her head back now, he heard the sea on the beach and felt the wind cool through the window. He felt the silk of her hair over his arm and their bodies hard and taut and he dropped his hand on her breasts to feel them rise, quick-budding under his fingers.
“Oh Roger,” she said. “Please. Oh please.”
“Don’t talk.”
“Is that him? Oh he’s lovely.”
“Don’t talk.”
“He’ll be good to me. Won’t he. And I’ll try to be good to him. But isn’t he awfully big?”
“No.”
“Oh I love you so and I love him so. Do you think we should try now so we’ll know? I can’t stand it very much longer. Not knowing. I haven’t been able to stand it all afternoon.”
“We can try.”
“Oh let’s. Let’s try. Let’s try now.”
“Kiss me once more.”
In the dark he went into the strange country and it was very strange indeed, hard to enter, suddenly perilously difficult, then blindingly, happily, safely, encompassed; free of all doubts, all perils and all dreads, held unholdingly, to hold, to hold increasingly, unholdingly still to hold, taking away all things before, and all to come, bringing the beginning of bright happiness in darkness, closer, closer, closer now closer and ever closer, to go on past all belief, longer, finer, further, finer higher and higher to drive toward happiness suddenly, scaldingly achieved.
“Oh darling,” he said. “Oh darling.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you my dear blessed.”
“I’m dead,” she said. “Don’t thank me. I’m dead.”
“Do you want—”
“No please. I’m dead.”
“Let’s—”
“No. Please believe me. I don’t know how to say it another way.”
Then late
r she said, “Roger.”
“Yes, daughter.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, daughter.”
“And you’re not disappointed because of anything?”
“No, daughter.”
“Do you think you’ll get to love me?”
“I love you,” he lied. I love what we did he meant.
“Say it again.”
“I love you,” he lied again.
“Say it once more.”
“I love you,” he lied.
“That’s three times,” she said, in the dark. “I’ll try to make it come true.”
The wind blew cool on them and the noise the palm leaves made was almost like rain and after a while the girl said, “It will be lovely tonight but do you know what I am now?”
“Hungry.”
“Aren’t you a wonderful guesser?”
“I’m hungry too.”
They ate at the Green Lantern and the widow woman squirted Flit under the table and brought them fresh mullet roe browned crisp and fried with good bacon. They drank cold Regal beer and ate a steak each with mashed potatoes. The steak was thin from grass-fed beef and not very good but they were hungry and the girl kicked her shoes off under the table and put both her bare feet on Roger’s. She was beautiful and he loved to look at her and her feet felt very good on his.
“Does it do it to you?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“Can I feel?”
“If the widow woman isn’t looking.”
“It does it to me too,” she said. “Aren’t our bodies nice to each other?”
They ate pineapple pie for dessert and each had another cold bottle of Regal fresh from deep in the melting ice water of the cooler.
“I have Flit on my feet,” she said. “They’ll be nicer when they don’t have Flit on them.”
“They’re lovely with Flit. Push really hard with them.”
“I don’t want to push you out of the widow woman’s chair.”
“All right. That’s enough.”
“You never felt any better did you?”
“No,” Roger said truly.
“We don’t have to go to the movies do we?”
“Not unless you want to very much.”
“Let’s go back to our house and then start out terribly early in the morning.”
“That’s fine.”
They paid the widow woman and took a couple of bottles of the cold Regal in a paper sack and drove back to the cabins and put the car in the space between cabins.
“The car knows about us already,” she said as they came in the cabin.
“It’s nice that way.”
“I was sort of shy with him at the start but now I feel like he’s our partner.”
“He’s a good car.”
“Do you think the man was shocked?”
“No. Jealous.”
“Isn’t he awfully old to be jealous?”
“Maybe. Maybe he’s just pleased.”
“Let’s not think about him.”
“I haven’t thought about him.”
“The car will protect us. He’s our good friend already. Did you see how friendly he was coming back from the widow woman’s?”
“I saw the difference.”
“Let’s not even put the light on.”
“Good,” Roger said. “I’ll take a shower or do you want one first?”
“No. You.”
Then waiting in the bed he heard her in the bath splashing and then drying herself and then she came into the bed very fast and long and cool and wonderful feeling.
“My lovely,” he said. “My true lovely.”
“Are you glad to have me?”
“Yes, my darling.”
“And it’s really all right?”
“It’s wonderful.”
“We can do it all over the country and all over the world.”
“We’re here now.”
“All right. We’re here. Here. Where we are. Here. Oh the good, fine, lovely here in the dark. What a fine lovely wonderful here. So lovely in the dark. In the lovely dark. Please hear me here. Oh very gently here very gently please carefully Please Please very carefully Thank you carefully oh in the lovely dark.”
It was a strange country again but at the end he was not lonely and later, waking, it was still strange and no one spoke at all but it was their country now, not his nor hers, but theirs, truly, and they both knew it.
In the dark with the wind blowing cool through the cabin she said, “Now you’re happy and you love me.”
“Now I’m happy and I love you.”
“You don’t have to repeat it. It’s true now.”
“I know it. I was awfully slow wasn’t I.”
“You were a little slow.”
“I’m awfully glad that I love you.”
“See?” she said. “It isn’t hard.”
“I really love you.”
“I thought maybe you would. I mean I hoped you would.”
“I do.” He held her very close and tight. “I really love you. Do you hear me?”
It was true, too, a thing which surprised him greatly, especially when he found that it was still true in the morning.
They didn’t leave the next morning. Helena was still sleeping when Roger woke and he watched her sleeping, her hair spread over the pillow, swept up from her neck and swung to one side, her lovely brown face, the eyes and the lips closed looking even more beautiful than when she was awake. He noticed her eyelids were pale in the tanned face and how the long lashes lay, the sweetness of her lips, quiet now like a child’s asleep, and how her breasts showed under the sheet she had pulled up over her in the night. He thought he shouldn’t wake her and he was afraid if he kissed her it might, so he dressed and walked down into the village, feeling hollow and hungry and happy, smelling the early morning smells and hearing and seeing the birds and feeling and smelling the breeze that still blew in from the Gulf of Mexico, down to the other restaurant a block beyond the Green Lantern. It was really a lunch counter and he sat on a stool and ordered coffee with milk and a fried ham and egg sandwich on rye bread. There was a midnight edition of the Miami Herald on the counter that some trucker had left and he read about the military rebellion in Spain while he ate the sandwich and drank the coffee. He felt the egg spurt in the rye bread as his teeth went through the bread, the slice of dill pickle, the egg and the ham, and he smelled them all and the good early morning coffee smell as he lifted the cup.
“They’re having plenty of trouble over there aren’t they,” the man behind the counter said to him. He was an elderly man with his face tanned to the line of the sweatband of his hat and freckled dead white above that. Roger saw he had a thin, mean cracker mouth and he wore steel-rimmed glasses.
“Plenty,” Roger agreed.
“All those European countries are the same,” the man said. “Trouble after trouble.”
“I’ll take another cup of coffee,” Roger said. He would let this one cool while he read the paper.
“When they get to the bottom of it they’ll find the Pope there.” The man drew the coffee and put the pot of milk by it.
Roger looked up interestedly as he poured the milk into the cup.
“Three men at the bottom of everything,” the man told him. “The Pope, Herben Hoover, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
Roger relaxed. The man went on to explain the interlocking interests of these three and Roger listened happily. America was a wonderful place he thought. Imagine buying a copy of Bouvard et Pécuchet when you could get this free with your breakfast. You are getting something else with the newspaper, he thought. But in the meantime there is this.
“What about the Jews?” he asked finally. “Where do they come in?”
“The Jews are a thing of the past,” the man behind the counter told him. “Henry Ford put them out of business when he published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
“Do you think they’re through?
”
“Not a doubt of it, fella,” the man said. “You’ve seen the last of them.”
“That surprises me,” Roger said.
“Let me tell you something else,” the man leaned forward. “Some day old Henry will get the Pope the same way. He’ll get him just like he got Wall Street.”
“Did he get Wall Street?”
“Oh boy,” the man said. “They’re through.”
“Henry must be going good.”
“Henry? You really said something then. Henry’s the man of the ages.”
“What about Hitler?”
“Hitler’s a man of his word.”
“What about the Russians?”
“You’ve asked the right man that question. Let the Russian bear stay in his own backyard.”
“Well that pretty well fixes things up,” Roger got up.
“Things look good,” the man behind the counter said. “I’m an optimist. Once old Henry tackles the Pope you’ll see all three of them crumble.”
“What papers do you read?”
“Any of them,” the man said. “But I don’t get my political views there. I think things out for myself.”
“What do I owe you?”
“Forty-five cents.”
“It was a first class breakfast.”
“Come again,” the man said and picked up the paper from where Roger had laid it on the counter. He’s going to figure some more things out for himself, Roger thought.
Roger walked back to the tourist camp, buying a later edition of the Miami Herald at the drugstore. He also bought some razor blades, a tube of mentholated shaving cream, some Dentyne chewing gum, a bottle of Listerine and an alarm clock.
When he arrived at the cabin and opened the door quietly and put his package on the table beside the thermos jug, the enameled cups, the brown paper bag full of White Rock bottles, and the two bottles of Regal beer they had forgotten to drink, Helena was still asleep. He sat in the chair and read the paper and watched her sleep. The sun was high enough so that it did not shine on her face and the breeze came in the other window, blowing across her as she slept without stirring.
Roger read the paper trying to figure out from the various bulletins what had happened, really, and how it was going. She might as well sleep, he thought. We better get whatever there is each day now and as much and as well as we can because it’s started now. It came quicker than I thought it would. I do not have to go yet and we can have a while. Either it will be over right away and the Government will put it down or there will be plenty of time. If I had not had these two months with the kids I would have been over there for it. I’d rather have been with the kids, he thought. It’s too late to go now. It would probably be over before I would get there. Anyway there is going to be plenty of it from now on. There is going to be plenty of it for us all the rest of our lives. Plenty of it. Too damned much of it. I’ve had a wonderful time this summer with Tom and the kids and now I’ve got this girl and I’ll see how long my conscience holds out and when I have to go I’ll go to it and not worry about it until then. This is the start all right. Once it starts there isn’t going to be any end to it. I don’t see any end until we destroy them, there and here and everywhere. I don’t see any end to it ever, he thought. Not for us anyway. But maybe they will win this first one in a hurry, he thought, and I won’t have to go to this one.