She looked up at him. Heart-shaped face, lips chapped and puffy, upturned little shikse nose. Bottle-green eyes dry of tears. It must have been the cold after all.
“What?” she said.
“Aren’t you cold?”
She slid her arms into the sleeves of the loden coat. She nodded.
“So why are you sitting out here?”
“I’m not allowed inside for two hours.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“Because I was bad.”
“So you have to sit outside in the cold for two hours?”
“Yes.”
“You must have been especially bad.”
“Yes.”
Two hours in the cold for a misbehaving kid seemed excessive, but he knew even less about the disciplinary habits of these people than he did about their footwear. He looked through the glass door for the Jew in the big fur hat, thinking he might have a word. The walls of the lobby or vestibule, a large spartan expanse with an angled modernist ceiling, had been papered with cutout onion domes and pointed arches to evoke a Persian mood. A large banner slung between two raked poles just inside the entrance read the road to shushan in mock-Arabic script. A few people were milling around by the door to the sanctuary, among them the Jew in the hat. A slender young woman stood beside the Jew, got up like a sideshow Salome in bangles and veils.
“You need me to put in a good word for you?” he said to the little girl. “I got an in with the warden.”
“What?”
“Who said you have to sit out here in the cold for two hours?”
“I did.”
“You did.”
“Yes.”
“Because you were bad.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So you’re punishing yourself.”
She nodded.
“What did you do that was so bad you had to punish yourself?”
“Mama said I was discourteous.”
“Who to?”
“The rabbi.”
“Really? How were you discourteous?”
“I asked him why he wears the same perfume as our downstairs neighbor Mrs. Poliakoff.”
“Oh-ho.”
“What?”
“What kind of perfume does Mrs. Poliakoff wear?”
“Jungle Gardenia.”
My grandfather laughed, and after a moment, with a degree of caution, the girl laughed, too.
“It’s funny,” she suggested.
“It is to me. Very.”
“Yes, it’s very funny.”
The door opened again and the Jew with the big fur hat was there, wearing a dime-store Santa beard and a Chinatown mandarin coat.
“Look, all of the bad little children are here.”
My mother stopped laughing and looked away.
“You know, I’m pretty sure Ray does wear Jungle Gardenia,” my grandfather said to my grandmother. “I think this one has paid her debt to society. Maybe we can let her come back from Siberia, huh?”
“I have been out here three times telling this to her!” my grandmother cried. “There is nothing you can tell to this one. I said to her, ‘You were rude, please, for two minutes, go and sit in a chair over there—inside of the room, not outside of the building. For two minutes! She says, ‘No! I am so bad, I am going to sit outside for two hours.’ I have been begging to her, please, come inside, you are going to catch a pneumonia!” My grandmother pronounced the initial p. She turned to my mother. The beard flapped up and down. “Do you want to get sick and go to the hospital? Do you want to die?” She sounded exasperated, even angry, and yet at the same time there was a theatrical trill in her voice, as if she were only playing the part of an exasperated mother at her wits’ end. Maybe that was just an effect of the comedy beard. “Is that what you want?” she said.
“No,” my mother said.
“I’m glad to hear that, because if you die, then I will have to kill myself, and I don’t want to die, either.”
My grandfather thought this kind of talk might be carrying things a little too far, but he wasn’t sure. He seemed to remember his mother engaging in rhetoric of this sort with him when she was at the end of her own wits. He was not sure how he felt about such talk, or he knew that he disliked it; but on this woman, it fit. In her pain and her vividness and her theatricality, she seemed to have access to some higher frequency of emotion, a spectrum of light invisible to his eyes.
At the mention of suicide, my mother looked up at her mother, intrigued. “Why will you have to kill yourself?” she said.
“Because without you I will have no one, and I will be totally alone, so what is the point then, I might as well die.”
“Okay, okay,” my grandfather said. “Nobody’s going to kill themselves, and nobody’s going to be alone.” He looked down at my mother. “I’ve been telling the rabbi he smells like Mrs. Poliakoff since before the war. And I don’t even know Mrs. Poliakoff. You think maybe I ought to spend the next two hours out here with you, punishing myself?”
“No,” my mother said. “I’ll come in.”
“Then so will I,” my grandfather said. He opened the door to the shul. “Come,” he said. He held out his hand to my mother. He was not certain he had ever held out his hand to a child in this way. He wanted my grandmother to see that he could hold out his hand to her daughter and that, when he did, her daughter would take it. If he could get the kid to relent and come in from the cold of a Baltimore afternoon, that would be another way for him to begin to mend what the war had broken.
For a second or two my mother seemed to consider taking his hand. In the end, though, she just got up and scurried inside. My grandfather was disappointed, and disappointment filled him with resolve. He would work at the kid. He would do what he needed to do until he had gained her trust and hopefully her affection.
“I’m sorry,” my grandmother said. Even through the fake beard with the preposterous hat, her eyes sought his, and searched his face, and saw his disappointment and his resolve. My grandfather was not sure anyone had ever looked at him like that unless they were hoping to clean his clock. At the possibility of truly being seen, something in his chest seemed to snap open like a parachute.
“It’s fine,” he said. He pointed to the beard, the caftan. “What’s this?”
“I am playing the part today of Mordecai, obviously. In the purimspiel.”
“That explains the shoes.”
“Your brother is Vashti.”
“In the veils.” That was Ray flouncing around outside the door to the sanctuary, vain and imperious as a queen of Persia. “Typecasting. Hey.” He put a hand on her arm. Even through the sleeve of the Chinese coat the charge of contact was there. “Doesn’t that thing bother you?” he said.
He pointed at the shtreiml. As he recalled, a proper shtreiml was made with the tails of some furry little animal, a marten or a mink. My grandmother looked confused by the question.
“You got something like eighteen mink tails on your head there.”
She did not look horrified by this information. The memory of screaming horses and peeled hides did not rack her like a fever. Instead she looked . . . It was hard for my grandfather to describe. It would have been easy enough for him, considering what came after, to recall the look that passed across my grandmother’s face that afternoon as one of embarrassment, discomfiture, the look of someone caught out in a moment of self-contradiction. But in the end the word that he settled on was impatient. She pursed her lips and gave her shoulders a little Gallic shrug, as if to suggest that he must already know the explanation for her tolerating the touch of death against her skin.
“It’s for the play,” she said.
10
Five minutes before the end of Devaughn’s next shift, my grandfather showed up at the security desk wearing rubber waders over stained chinos, holding an empty one-quart Ziploc. He carried a blue NASA knapsack, meant for children, into which he had placed a thermos of lemonade, a first aid kit, and a field guide
to snakes and reptiles from the Coconut Creek branch of the Broward County Library. In his right hand he carried a blackthorn walking stick, never used, that Sally Sichel had bought for her husband, Leslie, when his fatal disease first enfeebled him. Until yesterday afternoon the walking stick had been surmounted by a sterling silver duck’s head. In the Fontana Village metal shop my grandfather had (with Sally’s permission) removed this and replaced it with the iron head of a three-pound maul. As he walked across the grounds from his unit, swinging the stick, my grandfather had ignored a number of puzzled looks and two direct queries. But Devaughn understood at once what my grandfather had in mind.
“It was me?” he said, “I’d go with a machete.” Devaughn chopped at his left wrist with the edge of his right hand. “You want to decapacitate it, clean and quick.”
My grandfather made a mental note to see Perfecto Tiant, the chief of the landscaping crew, about borrowing a machete when the time came. He held up the Ziploc bag. “You said you saw its droppings,” he said. “I’d like you to help me get hold of some.”
“Right now.” Devaughn looked skeptical.
“Isn’t your shift over at eight?”
“Yes, sir, it is. But then, see, I’m kind of on Devaughn time.”
“Yeah? And what happens then?”
“On Devaughn time?” Devaughn rolled his eyes to the ceiling. He seemed to be consulting a long menu of pastimes and pursuits. “Well, for one thing? Not picking up a snake bowel movement, putting it into a baggie.”
“Never?”
“No, sir.”
My grandfather and Devaughn stared at each other. The mechanism in the clock on the wall behind the counter advanced with a loud thunk into the next minute of their lives.
“I suppose I might be willing to pay you for your trouble,” my grandfather said.
Devaughn smiled. He found it a comfort to see a show of miserliness in a Jew. He assumed that my grandfather was a millionaire. “How much?” he said.
“Twenty-five. But only if I get something to put in this bag.”
When the day man came in, Devaughn pulled on his billed cap with the Fontana Village logo and picked up his zippered nylon briefcase. My grandfather followed him to his car, a 1979 Cutlass Supreme. It sat creaking in the employee lot, vinyl top bleached and peeled by years in the heat of Florida. Devaughn opened the trunk and put in his briefcase, minus a peanut butter and potato chip sandwich that he folded over twice and rammed with a fingertip into his mouth. He unbuttoned his uniform shirt and hung it on a hanger from the valet hook inside his car. His belly sloshed in the wineskin of a ribbed undershirt. His bare shoulders were ivory-yellow and densely freckled. The freckles, like his hair and eyelashes, were the color of a Nilla wafer. He stuffed the billed cap into the briefcase and, from atop the rear dash, took out a straw cowboy hat whose brim curled up sharply at the sides. At the very back of the trunk, under the rear dash, he opened a toolbox of molded plastic and dug around until he found a machete as long as his forearm, in a leather sheath. Balancing it flat across his upturned palms, he contemplated my grandfather. He was still chewing the sandwich, lips pursing as his jaw worked up and down. “Doubt you going to need it this morning, but,” he said. “You welcome to borrow it if you want.”
“I don’t like to borrow,” my grandfather said. “I’ll rent it from you.”
“Suit yourself, then.”
My grandfather got into the car. It was an oven. He rolled down the window, and the trim of the handle burned his fingers. The air-conditioning wheezed. Its breath smelled of mildew tinged with peanut butter and potato chips.
“Time I really got a good look around in there?” Devaughn said. “It was with Finlay Gadbois, you remember Finlay?”
My grandfather recalled a blond pompadour behind a motocross magazine, two black brogues propped up on the security desk.
“Finlay’s brother was a investigator for some real estate lawyers got tangled up in the whole mess over there for a while? Took me and Finlay for a tour one time, we went right in the front gate. The, uh, droppings was all over the, like, the front porch of the clubhouse.”
“Show me.”
“It’s all chained up, though.”
“Show me.”
“With a padlock.”
My grandfather settled the NASA backpack on his lap and looked out the window at the expanse of Fontana Village. The scene never varied except for the transit of rain, people, and golf carts across it. Shadows of eaves and dormers moved slow as hour hands across the blank faces of the units. Stucco, palm trees, concrete walks, lawns that never seemed to grow or fade. Inverted over everything a glass bell of sky. Shake the whole thing a couple of times and you would stir up a flurry of glitter. My grandfather was tired of looking at it, to a depth of his soul that made him wonder if there might really be something wrong with him. The name and number of the specialist were still keeping company with Hosni Mubarak in the latest issue of Commentary. As soon he had taken care of this snake problem, he told himself, he would make that appointment.
“When I feel like I’ve got my twenty-five dollars’ worth,” my grandfather said, “then I’ll stop telling you what to do. Show me.”
Devaughn put the car in gear. He drove out of the gates of Fontana Village. They made three left turns, bending around a vast South Florida city block. Devaughn turned in to the driveway of the abandoned country club. Grass crazed the driveway. They did not get far before they had to stop. The property had been fenced all around with chain-link drowned in a surf of kudzu. Rusted signs warning away trespassers had been fixed to the fence by the city and by the defeated successors to the original losers of the country club. Among the warning signs stood a gate cabled and locked with a heavy padlock.
My grandfather got out of the car and notched the walking stick up under his arm. He took off his belt and fed it through the loop on the machete’s holster. He put the belt back on. He didn’t think he was going to need it this morning, either, but you never knew. Sometimes a hunter could get lucky.
Beyond the gate, the driveway carried on to an arch in a pink stucco wall. Kudzu had strung its green banners across the archway and worked its fingers into a thousand cracks in the pink stucco. On a frieze over the arc, between a pair of cartographic dolphins, a plaster triton sat on a compass rose, blowing a conch trumpet. The triton had lost its face. The leering dolphins were blackened with grime or mold. The name of the country club was Mandeville.
“That’s where you want to look for him,” Devaughn said, pointing at the cracked blacktop between the chain-link gate and the archway. “Middle of a nice hot road like that, end of the day when the air’s starting to get cool.”
“Where’s this clubhouse?”
“Through the arch, up the road. You can kind of almost see it, something pink there? Long way to go.”
“I see it.”
A shard of pink in green shadow. A forlorn pink, the pink of a tattered flamingo in a roadside zoo.
“Look there!” Devaughn was pointing to the left of the gate, just beyond the fence, under a sprawl of rhododendron.
My grandfather grabbed the hilt of the machete. His hand craved the bite of its blade into muscle. But there was no snake drowsing in a coil under the rhododendron. There was only what appeared to be a scrap of upholstery batting, a rude nest woven of gray twine and ashes. At one edge it devolved into a tuft of down that might once, my grandfather supposed, have been Ramon. It lay on the far side of the fence about three feet beyond the limits of either my grandfather’s or Devaughn’s reach.
My grandfather handed Leslie’s stick to Devaughn.
“What you call this thing?” Devaughn said, hefting it.
“It’s a snake hammer.”
Devaughn nodded knowledgeably. He got down on his belly and poked the stick under the fence toward the twist of scat. Grunting and cursing, he steered its steel tip to within an inch of the scat but no closer. He let go of the stick on the wrong side of the fence and it s
lid away from him. His body went slack against the ground. “Shit.” He looked at my grandfather, awaiting reproach.
“Decent snake hammer’s going to set you back more than twenty-five bucks,” my grandfather said.
He took Devaughn’s place on the ground and managed, straining, to retrieve the stick. His arms were long in proportion to the rest of him, but he had no better luck than Devaughn in reaching the remnant of Ramon. He stood up. Vertigo swept over him. Fire drew arabesques at the back of his eyes. “Shit,” he said.
“Name of the game,” Devaughn said.
My grandfather sat in the car with the door open and drank some of the lemonade from the thermos. A small plane droned toward the Atlantic, trailing a banner lettered in red capitals. He struggled to make out the distant text with an urgency he knew to be misplaced.
“Sea and Ski,” Devaughn said.
My grandfather nodded. He took out his wallet and paid Devaughn in full.
“Sorry it didn’t work out,” Devaughn said.
“Care to make it fifty?” my grandfather said.
Devaughn drove my grandfather to a hardware store and waited in the car. My grandfather bought a Yale padlock that appeared to be nearly identical to the one cabled to the chain-link gate. He gave some thought to a pair of bolt cutters, but they were expensive and bulky and he knew the sight of them would spook Devaughn. As it was, Devaughn eyed uneasily the paper bag in my grandfather’s lap.
When they got back to Mandeville, my grandfather climbed out of the car and shut the door. The temperature was ninety-five degrees. Across the feral golf course on the other side of the fence, a million insects played a one-note tone poem entitled Heat. My grandfather leaned in through the window on the passenger side. “Go park the car down the street,” he said. “By the lawn and garden store. I’ll meet you there in two minutes.”
“What you going to do?”
My grandfather walked over to the fence. He matched the padlock to the business end of the snake hammer.
“No,” Devaughn called. “No way.”