The Vietnamese pretty much all lived on boats, making it a Mercury/Evinrude question, though they were said to have a fine talent for reworking motorcycle engines for their additional power.
This morning Ham had an oil-stained Houston Astros baseball cap turned backward to keep the sun off the nape of his neck as he bent over the delinquent outboard motor. He wiggled one of its electrical leads gently between two enormous fingers. Sunlight turned the little hairs on his neck into wires of gold against his brick-red skin. A shirt of cheap grey Galveston cotton was cinched tight over his gigantic chest and even more enormous gut, bolted down by a bronze Smith & Wesson belt buckle the size of a bread plate. Ham’s daddy had been wearing that buckle the night the Flood washed over Galveston, making it the luckiest walkaway in the family. It had come to Ham when his older brother, Shem, died from alcohol poisoning after a palm whiskey binge at his bachelor party.
Josh was glad to catch Ham on the docks, rather than out in the scrub somewhere checking for leaks in a gas line, which was usually how he spent his days. “Sloane Gardner showed up at my door this morning, if you’ll believe it, tricked up like a Mardi Gras whore.”
Ham looked at him with interest. “All right! What happened?”
“Nothing,” Josh said.
Ham slapped himself in the forehead with one beefy hand. “I just thank the good Lord that I can look myself in the mirror and say, Ham, you did your part. You did not merely introduce the woman unto Joshua, you carried her into the house! And lo! He did minister to her there, but as a brother only, for his rain was puny and fell not upon her parched hills.” He shook his head, disgusted. “When the day comes that your dick falls off from disuse, at least I won’t be stung by the bitter lash of self-recrimination.”
Alice Mather, Ham’s mother, was a lifelong Sunday school teacher, and her second boy had a biblical turn of phrase. His Erotic Journeys of Paul were legendary. Ham spat into the Gulf. “What the hell do you mean, nothing?”
“I mean literally nothing. She vanished.” Josh wiped a sheen of sweat off his forehead. The day was going to be another cooker. “She wanted some damiana tea. I turned to get it off the shelf. When I looked back, she was gone. Disappeared.”
Ham whistled. “No shit?”
“She must have gone back to the Mardi Gras. That’s all I can figure.” Josh brought back the image of Sloane Gardner standing on his front porch, swaying slightly with exhaustion and booze, the smell of cigarettes still on her. She had seemed prettier this time. Light in her eyes. The faint smile as she started to ask for tea, that pretty woman’s smile, that asks forgiveness with no thought of being denied. Her dress had been ripped and stained and must have cost more than every stitch Joshua’s mother owned for the last three years of her life.
Should I know you? What’s your name?
Ham looked back over his shoulder at Josh, making the little motorboat rock. “Well, are you going to tell the sheriff? You know they’ve been looking for her.”
“Not yet. I promised I wouldn’t tell about her sneaking into Carnival.”
Ham rolled his eyes. “Has this woman even greased your monkey wrench, Josh?”
“Ham—”
“I’m just saying you don’t know her well enough to let your little head tell your big head what to do.”
“Sometimes you are such a shit.” Josh squatted down on the wooden dock.
“I’m serious, Josh.” Ham abandoned his motor and sat with his fat arms resting on the weathered dock. “When we were little, you were the only kid I knew who had the guts to leave the magic alone. No praying, no walkaways, no charms and bullshit. Remember when Mrs. MacReady’s dryer broke and she started putting out charms to make it get better? You got me in there to help take it apart, you figured out the solenoid was busted, you and me faked up a new one.”
“Which lasted about six months as I recall.”
“The point is, you never gave in,” Ham said. “‘Ham,’ you used to say, ‘I know the Mardi Gras is there, but once you let it get into your head, you’ll never be a free man again.’ Well, now I’m warning you: Mardi Gras and a rich skirt like Sloane Gardner, that spells trouble with a capital T.”
Josh laughed. “God, I was a bossy little bastard.”
“And I’m a better man for it,” Ham said. “I always told folks you were the smartest cookie in the neighborhood. Don’t go making a fool out of me over this Gardner girl, okay?”
“I’ll try,” Josh said, smiling. Ham turned back to his motor, making the boat slosh and dip and jounce against the floats that kept her aluminum hull from banging into the side of the dock. Every now and then Josh caught himself wondering why in hell the affable Ham put up with his moodiness. Apparently Ham knew, even if he didn’t. “Where are you going today?” he asked.
“Pelican Island, to walk a line.” Ham reconnected a cable and eased the cowling back over the Mercury’s engine. “Guys in the plant saw a pressure drop on number three line this week. I went out into the Gulf yesterday to check the Christmas tree, but the pressure at the wellhead hadn’t gone down. Then I pigged the line and pushed out some crud, but the pressure at the plant didn’t much recover. So today I get the pleasure of walking the line and cleaning the traps. If I can’t find the leak on land, then it’s your boy Hammy in a wet suit on the ocean floor checking for bubbles.”
Josh smirked. “I guess I’ll put you down for a flush tonight, then?”
Ham scowled. Before any serious diving he had to put mineral oil drops in his ears for a day and then sit with a towel around his neck, complaining bitterly, while Josh flushed the wax out of his ears with a turkey baster and warm water. “You just love to see me squirm, you peckerhead.”
Josh sat on the pier and let his feet dangle in the warm Gulf water. The tire-rubber soles of his sandals turned black and shiny. “My daddy had ostrich skin boots,” he said. “And loafers, Italian loafers. Ferragamo, I remember the brand. He used to…I remember one Mardi Gras, at the Krewe of Momus Grand Ball, he was the first one out on the floor. He tried to get my mother to dance, but she wouldn’t, not with everybody watching, so he asked some old lady, one of the Fords I think. He was a fine dancer. All night long women kept telling Mother how lucky she was. The only time she ever danced with him was in our kitchen.”
The bells of St. Patrick’s clanged out the half hour, rings of sound spreading sluggishly from the cathedral, muffled by the damp heat of the morning like ripples in molasses. The floating dock beneath Joshua rocked and creaked as a line of swell went by. The Mosquito Fleet, the band of shrimpers that headed out into the Gulf every morning, was already at the mouth of Galveston Harbor. A haze of gulls hung screaming and wheeling around the little flotilla.
Josh thought about Sloane Gardner.
A hideous mongrel, one ear eaten away by disease, limped onto the dock. The torment of fleas and mange had left the beast half-naked, its fur scoured off against concrete sidewalks or brick buildings. The dog snarled at Josh, then hobbled away.
“Ham, I think I’m going to join a Krewe.”
“You?” Ham spat, this time to connote surprise. “After, what, six years of you telling me you don’t need Krewes, can’t afford ’em, don’t believe in them? You want to join? What for? The back dues will kill you.” A line of sweat went inching down his cheek. He rubbed at it with a finger the size and shape of a hearty breakfast sausage. “Now I wonder if this might have something to do with the pussycat I drug out of the moonlight last week.”
“You know we held hands once? She didn’t even remember me,” Josh said. “As for joining a Krewe, it’s just time, that’s all.”
Ham looked at him slantwise. “Uh-huh.” He yanked the motor cord and his Mercury coughed into life in a small cloud of black smoke. Josh uncleated his bow rope. Ham headed out, his bulk pressing the nose of his boat down flat to the chop, aluminum hull glinting in the early sun. A long V of wash broke and widened slowly behind him.
JOSH went home. The CLOSED sign still
hung across his front door. He left it there. He kicked around the house a few minutes, then took Sloane’s stockings down from the towel rack in the bathroom where they had been hanging. He meant to store them back with his seining equipment but instead he took them upstairs to his room. To his own contempt he found himself masturbating, thinking of Sloane. Not the Sloane he had seen that morning, the party girl giddy with wine and exhaustion, but the other, demure one. The Grand Duchess’s daughter, who lived in Ashton Villa surrounded by servants. The one he should have been lusting after at fourteen. Instead he had been here, in this hovel, learning how to take corns off the feet of longshoremen and being sneered at by the pretty Mexican girls. Too unlucky to be a date even for the trailer park queens, though later they would come to him for their abortions, too broke to afford a real doctor.
When he got up from his bed he drank a small glass of water to hold off a dehydration headache he felt coming on. Then he checked on his chickens and took a look at his most recent batch of rice wine to make sure it was fermenting properly.
Today he would apply to join the Krewe of Momus. Couldn’t put it off anymore. Sorry, Mom, he thought. She never wanted to be beholden to anybody, least of all the Krewes that had abandoned them after their luck left with his daddy.
He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out an old lab book. From between its unused pages he took the note he had found on the kitchen table the day his mother disappeared.
Dearest Josh,
I am going away now.
We knew this day would come, and here it is. The choices are something quick and reasonably comfortable now, far away from the house—or ketoacidosis in two or three or five weeks, thirst and hyperpnea and coma. Not a hard decision. I think they call it the Lesser of Two Evils.
I don’t want to go, don’t ever think that. I worry, sometimes, that you believe I’m sadder than I am. You don’t have to rescue me, Josh. You never did. There’s nothing to rescue me from, it’s just life, and I have been glad to live, and blessed with the best son I could have hoped for.
Then a line starting with I wish. The rest heavily crossed out.
Cry for me, if you need to, but laugh for me, too. I will always be
Your loving Mom
P.S. I wouldn’t think of wasting the potassium chloride or the lanoxin for something like this, so don’t bother checking. I haven’t touched the stock. And remember to get those tinted bottles from the brewery next week!
P.P.S. I love you, kiddo. God bless.
AS always he found it very difficult to read the letter. To grasp it. The words fled from his understanding as he read, like Sloane’s faint stars, hidden when you looked at them.
AN hour later Joshua emerged from his house wearing his silk shirt and his nicest pair of pants, cheap Galveston cotton but carefully dyed to a pleasant yellow-tan. He had done the dyeing himself, cotton flowers with an alum-tannin-alum mordant, and then had the pants expertly cut and sewn by a seamstress down the street in exchange for a quart jar of bruise, cut, and sting ointment and twenty genuine pre-Flood aspirins. He hadn’t had many occasions to wear the pants; he had bought them to wear at Ham’s brother’s wedding.
Shoes were more problematic. Clearly his everyday sandals were not good enough for making an application to join a Krewe. His alternatives were the pair of battered boots he wore in winter or when hiking through the brush collecting plants for his shop, or a pair of black dress shoes of his father’s that had been lying undisturbed in his closet for twelve years. His mother had tried to toss them, but Josh had snuck out to the garbage and brought them back in. If she noticed them, later, tucked away in the closet, she hadn’t mentioned it.
He decided on the dress shoes. He pulled them carefully out of the closet, took them to the bathroom, and turned them upside down over the toilet. After a few brisk smacks, a brown recluse tumbled out of the left shoe into the toilet bowl. Josh took a dipper of salt water from the water barrel and flushed the spider away. Then he reamed the shoes out with a bottle-brush to make sure he’d gotten all the spiders. He scrubbed off the blotches of mold and rubbed them with powdered sage to take off the musty closet smell. The shoes were too large for him, but he found he could walk in them if he wore two pairs of socks and packed the heels and toes with cotton batting.
Amanda Cane had died four years ago, when the last of her stock of pre-Flood insulin gave out.
Here’s an equation: Status is power. Power is insulin. Insulin is life. Q.E.D. Status is life.
His mother had been willing to suffer. His mother had chosen to eat her bad luck when it came, as if somehow this would punish Joshua’s father for failing them. As if her suffering was the best weapon she had to reach him. Joshua had never seen much sign that this worked. Sam Cane had visited them twice, maybe three times, and then not again. There was a big service for Amanda, attended by all the people who had abandoned her in life. If you didn’t do everything to lay the spirits of suicides, the Recluse said, they tended not to stay completely dead. But Sam didn’t show. In the first few weeks after Amanda died, Joshua had been surprised—and angry—to find himself waiting for his father to appear, instead of keeping his mind on his mother and her sacrifices as he should have done. “Sumbitch should have showed,” Ham had said at the time.
To which Josh had replied, “My daddy always knew to fold a losing hand.”
Well. Time for Sam Cane’s boy to play with enough of a bankroll to win. Josh sprinkled his armpits and the soles of his shoes with sage powder. He even washed out his mouth with a capful of ancient Listerine, though the taste was so foul he wondered if it could have gone bad. The plastic bottle was webbed with fine white cracks like the crow’s-feet around old people’s eyes.
Of Galveston’s five Krewes, Joshua was the wrong sex to join the Krewe of Venus, and there wasn’t much social advantage to be gained by joining the annoying Krewe of Harlequins. That left three: the old and powerful Knights of Momus, the seafaring Krewe of Thalassar, and the Krewe of Togetherness. It was the Krewe of Togetherness his mother had once belonged to. She had resigned when Josh was fourteen, unwilling to take Krewe charity when she could no longer afford the dues. Nor could she bear crossing into the civilized part of Galveston, to be stared at and pitied while she put in her mandatory hours of community service. Against his mother’s will, Joshua had gone to them when he realized their supply of insulin was running out. The Krewe duty officer was politely sympathetic and put Amanda on a waiting list they both understood was too long to save her. Togetherness was not Joshua’s first choice of Krewe.
You don’t have to rescue me, Josh. You never did.
Which was quite true. He hadn’t.
It was past nine in the morning when Joshua left his house to head downtown. The sun ran like hot syrup over his neighborhood. Chickens clucked and roosters crowed; reconditioned car engines hummed counterpoint to the cicadas that drowsed and buzzed in the trees. Crossing Broadway was heaven. You couldn’t miss how much nicer it felt in the districts where the real people lived, under the shadowed canopy of live-oak limbs. Bluejays and mockingbirds flickered through the branches. The street was dappled with coins of early morning light. Horses and carriages rumbled down the middle of the road, while Josh and the other pedestrians walked in the dry gutter. The sidewalks here had been destroyed by live-oak roots long ago. Now jumbled slabs of concrete tipped and buckled at all angles beneath a ragged archway of oleanders, blooming white and pink. He wondered how many of the people living in these fine homes knew that the oleanders’ elegant spear-shaped leaves were deadly poison.
Once on the Strand, Josh was constantly having to stand aside to let carriages by, supply carts mostly, packed with cotton or cloth or barrels of vinegar or beer or salt, pulled by patient-looking horses with big bags rigged behind to catch their droppings. Josh wiped the sweat from his forehead and then nearly dried his hand on his pants leg. He should have brought a handkerchief. Damn. He kept walking, his hand wet, until he came to the Cott
on Exchange Building. He leaned against it as if merely pausing to catch his breath, leaving a damp palm print on the warm brick.
In five more minutes he had reached the Old Galveston Square Building, where the offices of the Ancient and Honorable Krewe of Momus were housed. Two tall doors confronted him, polished mahogany, tinted glass, brass handles. He pulled one briskly open, as if he had legitimate business here, and stepped inside.
The heels of his father’s shoes tapped on the lobby floor of black and white marble tiles. His feet were sweating heavily inside the two pairs of socks. He took a moment to compose himself. Voices eddied from the central atrium, and laughter, and the low throb of air-conditioning. It was cool inside, sinfully cool and dry. Josh felt himself break out sweating, as if all the moisture in the air was condensing on him, the one hot damp thing in this cool, dry, perfect building. He wiped his hands on his pants, swore, and checked for stains. He couldn’t see any, although he could feel the sweat in his armpits making his silk shirt damp.
The building was a hollow cube, three stories tall, each story with towering fifteen-foot ceilings. Light welled through the central atrium from a giant, frosted glass skylight. In front of Joshua was an old-fashioned elevator, a fancy wrought-iron cage faced with glass. Light winked and gleamed off its brass fittings. Across from it stood a machine that would press a penny into a decorative memento of the Strand, left over from Galveston’s renaissance as a tourist attraction at the turn of the millennium.