A Miracle of Catfish

  Lucinda blew the horn again and then got a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. The arguing people stopped arguing and they all looked at Albert and Lucinda again. Then the woman with the drink got a mean look in her eye and walked back to their Lexus.

  “Don’t roll the window down, honey,” Lucinda said. “You don’t know these people.”

  The woman with the drink stopped beside the car and rapped hard on Lucinda’s window with a big diamond ring. It was so big that it was stunning. It winked and shot bits of light in all directions even in the semidark outside the car. Lucinda rolled the window down. The woman with the drink leaned down and bent toward the car. She stopped just short of sticking her head inside.

  “What’s the fucking problem, sister?” she said.

  “We’d like to leave,” Lucinda said. “That’s the problem.”

  “Well, just go around,” the woman said, as if Lucinda were the stupidest person on earth.

  “We can’t go around,” Lucinda said. “You all have got the drive completely blocked.”

  “Aw, we ain’t got the damn drive blocked,” the woman said, and took another sip of her drink. It was in a clear plastic glass and there was a slice of lime floating around in it.

  Lucinda was tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. Then she blew the horn again. Long and loud. Lucinda looked toward the front door of the hotel and could see Lonzo and some of the other valets looking their way. But none of them had walked over yet. They were probably going to keep their noses out of it unless some shit happened.

  The woman did put her head inside the car then. She brought her face close to Lucinda’s and said, “Why don’t you stop blowing that fucking horn?”

  “Why don’t you make me?” Lucinda said. Then she blew it again. And again. The valets out front were still staring at them.

  “Tell them to move the fucking car, lady,” Lucinda said.

  The woman turned her head to yell at the men, who’d said something.

  “What?” she said. “Why don’t you let me handle this? I’m quite capable of handling it, okay, Harold?”

  “Okay,” Lucinda said. “Handle it then.”

  Then she tried to reason with her. Just as a last resort. Just to try and be reasonable herself.

  “Why don’t you all take your argument on down the road somewhere and let us out? Please? We’ve been sitting here a couple of minutes and we’re really ready to go.”

  “We’re figuring out where we’re going,” the woman said, and it was now apparent that she was pretty drunk. “And we’re trying to get the keys away from Ron.” She stood there beside the car and looked at him. “Drunk son of a bitch. Hung like a horse, though.”

  She leaned her face down to the car again.

  “We’re sorry,” she said, then looked at Albert, who was still sliding his finger in and out of his fist. “Oh, he’s … cute. Y’all in the hotel?”

  “We just came over for some drinks,” Lucinda said. Albert let out a short bark and the woman looked at him again, in out, in out, in out …

  “Y’all are not guests,” the woman said.

  “No,” Lucinda said. “We’re not guests.”

  “Oh,” the woman said, and then she walked back up to the men, who were leaning up against the Tahoe by now, still talking. She said something to them and they looked at the car Albert and Lucinda were sitting in and they said something to the woman and then they all laughed. Lucinda felt her face getting red.

  “They’re talking about us,” Lucinda said. Albert finally stopped all that stuff with his fist. They sat there. The car quietly running.

  “I can get Lonzo to get them to move,” Lucinda said. She put her hand on the door handle. “Wait just a minute.”

  But she didn’t get out because the drunk woman was walking back to their car. She leaned her face down again, but she didn’t get as close as before. The look on her face had changed again.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Lucinda said.

  “You know what I mean,” the woman said. She looked at both of them like something was funny. The men up by the Tahoe were yelling at her. The short guy had gone around to the other side and he’d given the keys to the guy who’d gotten out of the backseat.

  “I think your ride’s leaving,” Lucinda said to the woman. But the woman had fixed her eyes on them and was looking at them with something they’d both seen before.

  “There’s plenty of men in Atlanta,” the woman said. “I can introduce you to a couple if you want me to. You could upgrade and fuck somebody besides a retard.”

  “How fucking dare you,” Lucinda said, and tried to open her door. “I’ll kick your skinny ass, you drunk bitch.”

  “Wah!” Albert said, and reached out and grabbed her arm to hold her back. Lucinda snatched her arm away and started out the door, trying to untangle herself from the seat belt and harness.

  The drunk woman wobbled back and turned on her heel and made a misstep and then went on back to the Tahoe and got in. The door closed. The Tahoe pulled off and somebody waved an obscene gesture from a back window. Lucinda screeched the gearshift and for the first time choked off the car. Rested her forehead on the steering wheel with her eyes closed, cussing like her daddy used to.

  “Suck a puck for luck,” Albert said.

  So that messed up the rest of the whole night. They went on home, but it wasn’t the same. She knew it wasn’t going to be the same. As soon as they got into the apartment, Albert went back to his studio and shut the door and stayed in there for a while. They had decided together that Albert’s work was too important to be relegated to a broom closet or a spare bathroom, so he’d taken over the extra bedroom, ripped up the carpet, and in general had made one hell of a mess in there and was still making it. There was paint on the walls, paint on the ceiling. Long loopy swirls of it, and spatters here and there, layers of it on the floor. Lucinda dropped her purse on the kitchen counter and set about making herself a nightcap. But she stopped and walked back to Albert’s studio and rapped on the door.

  “Hey,” she said. “You want a nice cold Hershey’s bar?”

  Albert mumbled something from behind the door and Lucinda couldn’t make out what it was. But he was a known chocoholic.

  “Knock once for no and twice for yes,” Lucinda said.

  There was one faint knock.

  “Okay,” Lucinda said, and turned away. “Maybe later. I got some fresh sweet milk and Oreos, too, babe.”

  She went back to the kitchen and got a square crystal glass with a duck embossed on it from the cabinet to the left of the sink and opened the right side of their side-by-side refrigerator/freezer and scooped some cubes from the bin into her glass. She dropped one on the wood-grained vinyl flooring and it went skittering into the base mold. She had to bend over and pick it up or it would melt and be a wet spot in the floor in the morning.

  “Shit,” she grunted as she bent over. She picked it up and flung it into the sink. But it bounced out and somehow knocked over a wineglass that she had left beside the sink last night, causing it to topple into the metal drain and break. It made a slight ching! sound.

  “Gosh damn it!” Lucinda said. “Shit!”

  She set her unmade drink down and carefully picked up the broken pieces of glass and got them in her hands along with the stem, cradling them until she could drop them in the garbage. She went back to look and see if there were any glass chips she’d missed, but she couldn’t see anything. She turned on the cold water and rinsed her hands and then dried them on a fresh towel from the drawer, then hung the towel through one of the drawer pulls and finished making her drink. She found the bottle of Maker’s and tipped some of it over the ice cubes. She set the bottle down. She looked at the whisky in the glass. Then she tipped some more in there. About twice as much as what she’d had. Might as well. What in the hell did they go over to the Ritz-Carlton for anyway? Bunch of rich-ass people who didn’t have anythin
g in common with them. Maybe they needed to just stay away from there. They were rednecks even if they drove a Tahoe and looked like they had money. That woman was awful. She wished she’d kicked her ass. But that would have just upset Albert worse.

  There were some cold Cokes in the bottom of the icebox and she reached in for one and opened it and poured some of it over the ice and whisky. She watched and waited until the fizz ran down before she added some more and brought it to full. She was going to smoke some, too. She had to if she was going to drink. He’d probably stay back there. She reached across the sink and unfastened the latch on the aluminum window and pushed it up. She felt warm air waft in. It smelled like barbecue. And garbage. And auto exhaust. And there was noise. Distant noise. Some kind of a regular roar that was part of the interstate that wound around the city, the constant roar of trucks and cars that went on all day and all night. Sometimes she wondered what she was doing here and then she looked at Albert and knew. She was taking care of him. She had a purpose, a reason to get up every morning and a reason to come home every night. And she enjoyed her work, modeling large ladies’ lingerie. There was a need for what she did because big girls like her loved sexy things to wear, too.

  She leaned against the counter and turned her purse around and got her cigarettes and lighter out. She lit one and let the lighter fall to the counter. There was an ashtray in a drawer and she pulled it out. She set it near the stove and pulled one of the high stools across the floor, over close to the window, and sat down in it and reached for her drink. She sipped it. Why did she call her daddy tonight? Because she was afraid something was wrong. But he’d said that her mother was asleep. So if she was asleep, everything was probably okay. She had to stop putting it off and go see them before long. Hell. It wasn’t that big a deal. It just took some preparation to get Albert ready for the airport. She always had to pack his bags for him and make sure he wasn’t wearing anything that was made of metal, because he’d freaked out one day when he’d set the metal detector off with a fountain pen she hadn’t known was in his pocket, and they’d made him take his shoes off and go through the whole body-wand deal.

  She tried to blow her smoke out the window, but it kind of pooled in the air and started spreading throughout the kitchen. Fuck it. She paid the rent. And most of the groceries. And did most of the cooking when some cooking got done. But Albert could make the most beautiful cakes if you helped him, preheated the oven for him, mixed the batter, greased the pans, set the timer on the counter and listened to it ticking. Where he shined on cakes was decorating them. He could make lovely red roses, purple wisteria, green vines, blue wildflower petals, all with those little squeeze bottles of icing that came in all those different colors. She guessed it was related to his painting methods. Sometimes he just took a tube of paint and squeezed it from the tube directly onto the canvas. The floor in there was littered with them, but he refused to let her clean it up. His room stayed as cluttered as his mind. And then in one bright shining moment of clarity, whatever drove him to create slipped from where it was imprisoned in his brain into his fingers and together they made a thing of beauty on the canvases he had stretched and tacked himself. There were a lot of tacks in there on the floor. You didn’t want to go in there barefooted.

  She picked up her drink and sipped from it. It was way too strong, but that was all right. She might just sit up and get drunk and watch a movie. She had some weed left, but it wasn’t really good to mix too much of both of them together. Getting drunk was one thing and getting stoned was another thing, but getting drunk along with getting stoned was a whole other thing and not a good thing if you overdid it. She’d gotten to where she really hated to wake up with a hangover, and she knew it made her irritable with Albert when she did. But all he’d do was walk into the kitchen and make her a Bloody Mary and squeeze some fresh limes into it and bring it to her. He was good at mixing things somehow. For what he didn’t have, to take the place of them, things like normal speech or the ability not to bark involuntarily sometimes, he had other things. Things that let her see that he had many gifts, just slightly out of order.

  Lucinda sat there and tried to blow her smoke out the window again and sipped her Maker’s and wondered how her daddy’s garden was doing this year. He’d always raised so much food, cabbage and onions and Irish potatoes and sweet potatoes and squash and corn and tomatoes and English peas and purple hull peas. His rows were always so clean because he simply refused to let one stem of grass go to seed in his garden. It took lots of work with a hoe, but all her life at home she’d seen him almost every summer evening out there in the orderly dirt, chopping with the hoe, delicately sometimes, vigorously sometimes, keeping it all clean, gathering the okra, bringing in squash in a bucket. The sky growing dark back behind the big pecans and the chinaberry tree where he always hung his post-hole digger. The cows bawling. Sometimes she missed it so badly she could hardly stand it. Like now. She didn’t need to keep Albert in Atlanta. She needed him out in the country. But there was Daddy.

  Lucinda heard the door on the studio open. He’d turned his radio on. She took another drag on her smoke and sipped her drink. She heard Albert go into the bedroom. She made a move to get up, then stopped. Kept sitting there. Listening to the radio playing back there. Pop tunes from the mid-1980s. Albert listened to the crappiest shit on the radio.

  She tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette and crossed her legs on the stool. Albert was bumping around in the bedroom. Drawers were opening and closing. She put her cigarette in the ashtray and went back there.

  She poked her head in the door. Albert had already changed out of his clothes and had on a pair of baggy black silk boxer shorts with red hearts printed on them that Lucinda had given him. He was bent over a drawer and he didn’t look up. Lucinda could see almost all of his slim tanned body, and it caused a great ache of wanting in her heart. Why couldn’t other people just leave them alone? She couldn’t understand why people couldn’t accept him as he was. He was kind and gentle. He had a lot of good things going for him. He had more talent in one of his little fingers than most people had in their whole bodies.

  “Hey,” Lucinda said, as softly and as gently as she could. He had to know that she loved him completely as he was.

  “Hey.”

  “How you doing?” she said. She walked on into the bedroom and sat down on the bed. The big pale yellow comforter was already pulled back, exposing just one pillow.

  “I’m pretty tired,” he said, still going through the drawer.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucinda said. Albert slammed the drawer crisply and marched past her and out the door. He looked pretty sad.

  “Holy fucking shit,” she said in a low voice. He went back down the hall, his bare feet making little padded sounds, and the bathroom door slammed shut. Lucinda got up. She stood there for a moment, looking at the bed, and then she raised one foot at a time and slipped her loafers off, then sat back down on the bed and pulled her socks off. She unsnapped her tight designer jeans and slipped them down her legs and kicked them toward a chair. She pulled her red pullover over her head and threw it on the chair and unsnapped her bra and took it off. […] She put the bra on top of the dresser and opened the closet door. She pulled a Waylon Jennings T-shirt over her head, glad to have the bra off. Her breasts were very big and she liked the looseness of them under the T-shirt. […] But Albert was sad and he’d stay sad overnight. And he couldn’t make love to her when he was sad. He wasn’t physically able to. A doctor they’d seen didn’t know why. Something related to his brain. Everything was related to his brain. She’d read up on it. Some doctors thought people with Tourette’s had abnormalities in their neurotransmitters. Albert had displayed his first symptoms at age seven, which was usual in people with Tourette’s. His parents had pulled him out of the second grade when he’d started disrupting his class so badly and had schooled him at home. That had kept other children from mercilessly mocking him, but Lucinda thought it had also partially deprived hi
m of learning how to function around other people.

  There was a pair of pink jogging pants on a hanger and she slipped into them, and found her house shoes on the floor of the closet, and wriggled her feet into them. Then she went back to the kitchen. Her cigarette had burned down almost to the filter and she stubbed it out and almost immediately lit another one. She picked up her drink and sipped it. The whisky was starting to build a warm place inside her and she could sleep as late as she wanted to in the morning.

  The radio went off back there. She heard the light click off, and then the padded walking of Albert’s feet back into the bedroom. She didn’t hear the door shut.

  “You going to bed?” Lucinda called from the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” came the dim answer from Albert. A square of light in the hall went dark. It was like he had flicked a switch on her happiness for the evening. But she knew that he was just feeling bad, and needed to lie awake in the dark for a while and look up at the ceiling, and run through whatever was running through his sweet fucked-up brain.

  […] Lucinda wound up getting her pot out of a drawer in the living room and putting some in her pipe and mixing a fresh drink and settling down in front of the television and getting stoned and drunk while watching movies and documentaries about World War II and biographies of minor television stars until about midnight when she went to sleep on the couch.

  She dreamed of something she could never remember whenever she was awake. A thing buried, a thing not quite permanently put away. A thing that got dimmer as the years went on but was always there. A memory from maybe a child’s fever dream. An enormous silent growing ball that was coming to crash against the earth, taking eternity to get here, she standing between them on a mountaintop pile of rocks, watching in silent space the enormity of what was coming. Not just her death but the death of everything. The death of the world. Of all worlds.