Quilty takes it and wipes his mouth. “Just when we were getting so good at being boring together,” he says. He reaches over and pats Mack’s arm, then reaches up and roughly pets his head. Mack’s hair is thin and swept back, and Quilty swipes at it from behind.
“Ow,” says Mack.
“I keep forgetting your hair is so Irish and sensitive,” he said. “We’ve gotta get you some good tough Jew hair.”
“Great,” says Mack. He is growing tired of this, tired of them. They’ve been on these trips too many times before. They’ve visited Mother Goose’s grave in Boston. They’ve visited the battlefield at Saratoga. They’ve visited Arlington. “Too many cemeteries!” said Mack. “It’s the goddamn Bone Zone wherever we go!” They visited the Lincoln Memorial (“I imagine it’s like a big marble Oz,” said Quilty. “Abraham Oz. A much better name, don’t you think?”). Right next door, they visited the Vietnam War Memorial, mind-numbing in its bloodless catalog of blood, Mack preferring instead the alternative monument, the buddy statue put up by the vets, something that wanted less to be art than to be human. “It’s about the guys, not just the names of the guys,” he said. “Guys died there. A list: didn’t die there.” But Quilty, who had spent an hour feeling for friends who’d died in ’68 and ’70, had sighed in a vaguely disgusted, condescending way.
“You’re missing it totally,” he said. “A list did die. An incredible heartbreaking list.”
“Sorry I’m not such an intellectual,” said Mack.
“You’re jealous because I was feeling around for other men.”
“Yeah. I’m jealous. I’m jealous I’m not up there. I’m jealous because—stupid me—I waited until peacetime to enlist.”
Quilty sighed. “I almost went. But I had a high draft number. Plus, guess what? Flat feet!”
At that, they both broke, feebly, into loud, exhausted laughter, like two tense lunatics, right there by the wall, until someone in a uniform asked them to leave: other people were trying to pray.
Trying to go someplace without cemeteries, they once flew to Key West, ate a lot of conch chowder and went to Audubon’s house, which wasn’t Audubon’s house at all, but a place where Audubon had stayed once or something, shooting the birds he then painted. “He shot them?” Mack kept asking. “He shot the damn birds?”
“Revolting,” said Quilty loudly. “The poor birds. From now on, I’m going to give all my money to the Autobahn Society. Let’s make those Mercedes go fast, fast, fast!”
To prevent Mack’s drinking in despair, they later found an AA meeting and dropped in, made friends and confessed to them, though not exactly in that order. The following day, new pals in tow, they strolled through Hemingway’s house in feather boas—“just to taunt Papa.”
“Before he wrote about them,” said Quilty, pretending to read the guidebook out loud, “Hemingway shot his characters. It was considered an unusual but not unheard-of creative method. Still, even within literary circles, it is not that widely discussed.”
The next morning, at the request of a sweet old man named Chuck, they went to an AIDS memorial service. They sat next to Chuck and held his hand. Walt Whitman poems were read. Cello suites were played so exquisitely that people fell forward onto their own knees, collapsed by the beauty of grief. After the benediction, everyone got solemnly into their cars and drove slowly to the grave site. No matter how Mack and Quilty tried to avoid cemeteries, there they were again. A boneyard had its own insistent call: like rocks to sailors, or sailors to other sailors. “This is all too intense,” whispered Mack in the middle of a prayer; at the grave site, Mack had positioned them farther off from the mourners than Quilty knew. “This is supposed to be our vacation. When this prayer is over, let’s go to the beach and eat cupcakes.” Which is what they did, letting Guapo run up and down the sand, chasing gulls, while the two of them lay there on a towel, the sea air blasting their faces.
Now, on this trip, Mack is in a hurry. He wants to leave the chipping white brick of Hannibal, the trees and huckleberries, the local cars all parked in the lot of some Tony’s Lounge. He wants to get on to St. Louis, to Memphis, to New Orleans, then back. He wants to be done with touring, this mobile life they embark on too often, like old ladies testing out their new, sturdy shoes. He wants his stitches removed.
“I hope there won’t be scars,” he says.
“Scars?” says Quilty in that screechy mockery he sometimes puts on. “I can’t believe I’m with someone who’s worried about having a good-looking dick.”
“Here is your question. What American playwright was imprisoned for her work?”
“Her work. Aha. Lillian Hellman? I doubt it. Thornton Wilder—”
“Mae West,” blurts out Mack.
“Don’t do that! I hadn’t answered yet!”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters to me!”
There is only a week left.
“In St. Louis”—Quilty pretends again, his old shtick, to read from the guidebook as they take the bumpy ride to the top of the arch—“there is the famous gateway, or ‘arch,’ built by the McDonald Corporation. Holy Jesus, America, get down on your knees!”
“I am, I am.”
“Actually, that’s true. I heard someone talking about it downstairs. This thing was built by a company named McDonald. A golden arch of gray stone. That is the gateway to the West. At sunset very golden. Very arch.”
“Whaddyaknow.” Gray stone again. There’s no getting away from it.
“Describe the view to me,” says Quilty when they get out at the top.
Mack looks out through the windows. “Adequate,” he says.
“I said describe, not rate.”
“Midwestern. Aerial. Green and brown.”
Quilty sighs. “I don’t think blind men should date deaf-mutes until the how-to book has been written.”
Mack is getting hungry. “Are you hungry?”
“It’s too stressful!” adds Quilty. “No, I’m not hungry.”
They make the mistake of going to the aquarium, instead of to an early dinner, which causes every sea creature to look delicious to Mack. Quilty makes the tour with a group led by a cute schoolteacherish guide named Judy, but Mack ventures off on his own. He feels like a dog set loose among schoolchildren: Here are his friends! The elegant nautilus, the electric eel, the stingray with its wavy cape and idiot grin, silently shrieking against the glass—or is it feeding?
When is a thing shrieking and when is it feeding—and why can’t Mack tell?
It is the wrong hour of the day, the wrong hour of life, to be around sea creatures. Shrieking or feeding. Breaded or fried. There is a song Mack’s aunt used to sing to him when he was little: “I am a man upon the land. I am a Silkie on the sea.” And he thinks of this now, this song about a half man, half seal or bird—what was it? It was a creature who comes back to fetch his child—his child by a woman on the land. But the woman’s new husband is a hunter, a good shot, and kills him when he tries to escape back to the sea with the child. Perhaps that was best, in the end. Still the song was sad. Stolen love, lost love, amphibious doom—all the transactions of Mack’s own life: I am a Silkie on the sea. “My life is lucky and rich,” he used to tell himself when he was painting high-voltage towers in Kentucky and the electric field on those ladders stood the hairs of his arms on end. Lucky and Rich! They sounded like springer spaniels, or two unsavory uncles. Uncle Lucky! Uncle Rich!
I am a man upon the land, he thinks. But here at sea, what am I? Shrieking or feeding?
Quilty comes up behind him, with Guapo. “Let’s go to dinner,” he says.
“Thank you,” says Mack.
After dinner, they lie in their motel bed and kiss. “Ah, dear, yes,” murmurs Quilty, his “dears” and “my dears” like sweet compresses in the heat, and then there are no more words. Mack pushes close, his cool belly warming. His heart thumps against Quilty’s like a water balloon shifting and thrusting its liquid from side to side. There is som
ething comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you. Something exhilarating, even: having your chins over each other’s shoulders, your feet touching, your heads pressed ear-to-ear. Plus he likes—he loves—Quilty’s mouth on him. A man’s full mouth. There is always something a little desperate and diligent about Quilty, poised there with his lips big and searching and his wild unshaded eyes like the creatures of the aquarium, captive yet wandering free in their enclosures. With the two of them kissing like this—exculpatory, specificity, rubric—words are foreign money. There is only the soft punch in the mouth, the shrieking and feeding both, which fills Mack’s ears with light. This, he thinks, this is how a blind man sees. This is how a fish walks. This is how rocks sing. There is nothing at all like a man’s strong kiss: apologies to the women of Kentucky.
They eat breakfast at a place called Mama’s that advertises “throwed rolls.”
“What are those?” asks Quilty. They turn out merely to be warm buttermilk rolls thrown at the clientele by the waiters. Mack’s roll hits him squarely in the chest, where he continues to clutch it, in shock. “Don’t worry,” says the waiter to Quilty. “Won’t throw one at you, a blind man, but just maybe at your dawg.”
“Good God,” says Quilty. “Let’s get out of here.”
On the way out, by the door, Mack stops to read the missing-child posters. He does not look at the girls. He looks at the boys: Graham, age eight; Eric, age five. So that’s what five looks like, thinks Mack. Lou will be five next week.
Mack takes the slow southerly roads. He and Quilty are like birds, reclaiming the summer that left them six weeks before in the north. “I’ll bet in Tapston they’ve all got salt spats on their boots already,” says Mack. “Bet they’ve got ice chunks in their tires.” Quilty hates winter, Mack knows. The frozen air makes things untouchable, unsmellable. When the weather warms, the world comes back. “The sun smells like fire,” Quilty says, and smiles. Past the bleached doormat of old wheat fields, the land grows greener. There is cotton harvested as far north as Missouri, the fields spread out like bolts of dotted swiss, and Mack and Quilty stop on the shoulder once, get out to pick a blossom, peel back the wet bud, feel the cotton slowly dry. “See what you miss, being a Yankee,” says Mack.
“Missing is all I do,” says Quilty.
They come upon a caravan of Jeeps and Hummers painted beige and headed south for a ship that no doubt will take them from one gulf to another. Mack whistles. “Holy shit,” he says.
“What?”
“Right now, there’re about two hundred army vehicles in front of us, freshly painted desert beige.”
“I can’t bear it,” says Quilty. “There’s going to be a war.”
“I could have sworn there wouldn’t be. I could have sworn there was just going to be a television show.”
“I’ll bet there’s a war.” They drive to Cooter along with the Jeeps, then swing off to Heloise to look at the river. It is still the same slow mongoose brown, lacking beauty of some kind Mack can’t quite name. The river seems to him like a big ticky dog that doesn’t know its own filth and keeps following your car along on the side as you drive.
They get out of the car to stretch. Mack lights a cigarette, thinking of the Jeeps and the Saudi desert. “So there it is. Brown and more brown. Guess that’s all there is to a river.”
“You’re so … Peggy Lee,” says Quilty. “How about a little Jerome Kern? It don’t plant taters. It don’t plant cotton. It just keeps rolling along.”
Mack knows the song but doesn’t even look at Quilty.
“Smell the mud and humidity of it,” says Quilty, breathing deeply.
“I do. Great humidity,” says Mack. He feels weary. He also feels sick of trying, tired of living, and scared of dying. If Quilty wants musical comedy, there it is: musical comedy. Mack drags on his cigarette. The prospect of a war has seized his brain. It engages some old, ongoing terror in him. As a former soldier, he still believes in armies. But he believes in armies at rest, armies relaxing, armies shopping at the PX, armies eating supper in the mess hall. But armies as TV-network football teams? The quick beginning of the quick end.
“I hear the other side doesn’t even have socks,” says Quilty when they are back in the car, thinking of the war. “Or rather, they have some socks, but they don’t all match.”
“Probably the military’s been waiting for this for years. Something to ace—at last.”
“Thank God you’re not still in the reserves. They’re calling up all the reserves.” Quilty reaches up under Mack’s shirt and rubs his back. “Young people have been coming into my office all month to have their wills drawn up.”
Mack was in the reserves only a year before he was thrown out for drunkenness on one of the retreats.
“The reserves used to be one big camping trip,” Mack says.
“Well, now it’s a camping trip gone awry. A camping trip with aspirations. A big hot camping trip. Kamp with a K. These kids coming in for wills: you should hear the shock in their voices.”
Mack drives slowly, dreamy with worry. “How you doing back there, Miss Daisy?” Quilty calls over his shoulder to Guapo. Outside of Memphis, on the Arkansas side, they stop at a Denny’s, next to a warehouse of dinettes, and they let Guapo out to run again.
Dinettes, thinks Mack. That’s just what this world needs: a warehouse of dinettes.
“I once tried to write a book,” says Quilty, seated cozily in his booth, eating an omelette.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. I had these paragraphs that were so huge, they went on for pages. Sentences that were also just enormous—two or three pages long. I had to shrink things down, I was told.”
Mack smiles. “How about words? Did you use big words, too?”
“Huge words. And to top it off, I began the whole thing with a letter I razored off a billboard.” He pauses. “That’s a joke.”
“I get it.”
“There was a book, though. I was going to call it Dating My Sofa: A Blind Man’s Guide to Life.”
Mack is quiet. There is always too much talking on these trips.
“Let’s hit Memphis on the way back,” says Quilty irritably. “For now, let’s head straight to New Orleans.”
“That’s what you want to do? Fine.” Mack has no great fondness for Memphis. Once, as a boy, he’d been chased by a bee there, down a street that was long and narrow and lined on one side with parked cars. He’d ducked into a phone booth, but the bee waited for him, and Mack ended up stepping out after twenty minutes and getting stung anyway. It wasn’t true what they said about bees. They were not all that busy. They had time. They could wait. It was a myth, that stuff about busy as a bee.
“That way, coming back,” adds Quilty, “we can take our time and hit the Peabody when the ducks are out. I want to do the whole duck thing.”
“Sure,” says Mack. “The duck thing is the thing.” On the way out of Denny’s, Mack pulls slightly away from Quilty to look at another missing-child poster. A boy named Seth, age five. The world—one cannot drive fast or far enough away from it—is coming at him in daggers.
“What are you looking at?”
“Nothing,” says Mack, then adds absently, “a boy.”
“Really?” says Quilty.
Mack drives fast down through the small towns of the Delta: Eudora, Eupora, Tallula—the poorest ones with names like Hollywood, Banks, Rich. In each of them, a Baptist church is nestled up against a bait shop or a Tina’s Touch of Class Cocktails. The strawy weeds are tall as people, and the cotton puffs here are planted in soils grown sandy, near shacks and burned-out cars, a cottonseed-oil factory towering over the fields, the closest hamburger at a Hardee’s four miles away. Sometimes the cotton fields look like snow. Mack notices the broken-down signs: EAT MAID-RITE EATS or CAN’T BEAT DICK’S MEAT. They are both innocent and old, that peculiar mix, like a baby that looks like a grandmother, or a grandmother that looks like a girl. He and Quilty eat lunch and dinner at
places that serve hush puppies and batter-fried pickles; it reminds Mack of his aunt’s cooking. The air thickens and grows warm. Sinclair brontosauruses and old-style Coke signs protrude from the road stops and gas stations, and then, closer to Baton Rouge, antique stores sell the same kinds of old Coke signs.
“Recycling,” says Mack.
“Everyone’s recycling,” says Quilty.
“Someone told me once”—Mack is thinking of Annie now—“that we are all made from stars, that every atom in our bodies was at one time the atom of a star.”
“And you believed them?” Quilty hoots.
“Fuck you,” says Mack.
“I mean, in between, we were probably also some cheese at a sorority tea. Our ancestral relationship to stars!” says Quilty, now far away, making his point before some judge. “It’s the biological equivalent of hearsay.”
They stay in an antebellum mansion with a canopy bed. They sit beneath the canopy and play Trivial Pursuit.
Mack once again reads aloud his own questions. “Who was George Bush referring to when reminiscing: ‘We’ve had some triumphs; we’ve made some mistakes; we’ve had some sex’?”
Mack stares. The canopy bed looks psychotic. Out the window he sees a sign across the street that says SPACE FOR LEASE AT ABSOLUTELY YOGURT. Next to it, a large white woman is hitting a small black dog with a shopping bag. What is wrong with this country? He turns the card over and looks. “Ronald Reagan,” he says. He has taken to cheating like this.
“Is that your answer?” asks Quilty.
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re probably right,” says Quilty, who often knows the answer before Mack has read it to him. Mack stares at the bed again, its canopy like the headdress the Duchess wore in Alice in Wonderland. His aunt would sometimes read that book to him, and it always made him feel queasy and confused.
On the nightstand, there are sachets of peach and apricot pits, the sickly sweet smell of a cancer ward. Everything here now in this room reminds him of his aunt.