“The loneliness of the cage,” he mused. “Your cage, mine. What does it matter whose? Somebody cages us all, don’t they?”
“Excuse me?” Eric said. The guy looked wacko but the monkey just looked sick. Its eyes were dull and mucus was coming from its nostrils. The guy had a Kleenex in his hand, had obviously been wiping its nose.
It probably had some disease. That thing didn’t need to be in here. Old fellow looked bad, though. He hated to run him out. But he had to think about his job, too, since Mr. Studebaker also cut him a deal on ear-mite drops and heartworm pills for Jada Pinkett.
“Look, mister,” he said. “I ain’t tryin’ to be ugly or nothin’ but that thing looks sick to me and I know my boss wouldn’t want a sick animal in here with all his healthy ones. I think you need to take it to the vet or somethin’.”
Eric watched as some tears broke from the corners of the little man’s eyes. Something seemed to have cracked inside him.
“There’s nothing wrong with Bobby,” he said. “Bobby’s gonna be okay. Aren’t you, boy?”
He looked down at the animal and rubbed the top of its head and it vomited a thin dribble of foamy yellow puke down its front and over his jacket and hand. And then he just lost it and cried and cried, stood there, shaking but almost soundless, bent over slightly and holding the nasty shivering thing close to him.
“Mister. Come on. Please? You need to get that thing on out of here.”
He hated to have to say that. But there wasn’t anything he could do for him. Maybe he’d had him a long time. Maybe he was like his kid to him. You never knew. Some people bought sweaters for their dogs or wore them around in bags on their chests like papooses. He’d seen that once in Nashville. But you could see a lot of stuff in Nashville. Like some real pretty whores on the sidewalks, walking around in hot pants. You could just buy them. If you had the money.
“I thought maybe you could save him for me,” the elf wept. “I can’t afford the proper veterinary care.”
Eric didn’t know what to say after he saw all that. After a while the elf gave up and turned and shuffled out with his monkey. Eric stepped to the door and for a long time watched him go up the sidewalk surrounding the mall. He could see him stopping to talk to people, and people turning away from him. Some had Christmas gifts already. Others were holding hands. A lot of them seemed to be happy. Up the sidewalk the little man was still stopping people. But not very many of them stopped for long. They all had their own Christmas deals going probably.
46
The rescue effort failed. A bunch of Seals in cold-water scuba gear and loaded with shark repellent went out from a side compartment in black rubber boats with twin Johnson engines and they tried to help the mother whale, but she was too grievously injured to be saved by human hands.
Wayne and Henderson stood on the deck at about 1500, looking down, a sunny afternoon but cold, watching them surround in boats the whale mother below in the mostly deserted Atlantic. Even from high up there, Wayne could see the three terrible cuts across her side, and the bulge of her gray intestines spilling out into the water with some blood. A Greenpeace boat out of Norfolk had pulled next to them and the water between the enormous ship and the environmentalists’ vessel was stained red. Everybody was looking for sharks.
“That’s a lowdown dirty shame,” Henderson said. “That thing swimmin’ around free as a bird. Nursin’ that baby like a cow.”
“They ain’t gonna catch that calf, neither,” Wayne said. No shit. The Greenpeace guys had brought rope nets with floats and had made an effort with small motorboats to herd the calf into one of them, but the calf had turned over one of the motorboats and almost drowned three of the six volunteers who were on it by hitting them, in its fear and panic, with its tail a couple of times, which should have been no big surprise since it weighed a couple of thousand pounds. One of the Greenpeacers had a concussion and a few subdural hematomas and a broken nose and three broken fingers and had to be airlifted out by one of the Coast Guard choppers sitting on the deck. They had given up after that, and now they were all just kind of sitting around watching it, and watching the mother die. The calf was shy now and hung back.
All the newspeople had left on orders from the Pentagon because the Pentagon was pissed. So many people wanted to get up on the flight deck that the captain came over the intercom and said he didn’t think it was much of a thing to watch, kind of like a flood, but those who wanted to could go up in shifts if they were off duty.
“Shit,” Henderson said, looking at Wayne. “Cap’n all worried about his job now he done had a collision. All he usually worried about is gettin’ him a cold Schlitz after supper and kickin’ back to watch Bonanza.”
“How you know he drinks Schlitz?” Wayne said.
“Poo-Head. Works in the officers’ mess. Takes him one up.”
They looked down. The wind was blowing in Wayne’s face and the bottoms of his bell-bottoms were wet. The whale lay on her side, trying to maintain her position so that she could still blow her exhaled air out of the water. She rose and fell slightly with the motion of the ocean. The Seals and the Greenpeace guys had surrounded her with their little flotilla of boats and nets. Some of them were touching her. Still others at her head were saying things to her. She was almost too weak to move now and the Seals were not scared of anything anyway. Nobody knew when they were going back. That decision hadn’t been made just yet. That decision was up to somebody bigger than the captain. All Wayne knew was that they were going back. And he felt bad for the whales. He decided he would stay on the deck as long as he could.
He and Henderson stayed out there until dark. Wayne worked for a while in the armory and let a couple of marines check out their M-14s so they could clean them for an inspection. He read a woodworking magazine and cut his fingernails. He thought about Anjalee and wondered what she was doing right now. She might even be sitting in that same bar.
After a few more hours, his relief came in and he went for a roast beef sandwich with hot mustard but didn’t see Henderson in the galley. He talked to some boys he knew who were flight deckhands and they’d been watching the whale event unfold, too. One of them said it looked to him like the whale would die pretty soon and another one said he thought it might take days.
After he finished eating, he still wasn’t sleepy, so he went back up to see if he could get back on deck and he could. The lights were up on the bridge as if for flight operations. He walked to the edge of the sailors, who all had their pea coats on now with the chill night air, and he was surprised to look down and see that the Seals and some of the Greenpeace guys were still in the water dumping shark repellant and using lamps they had rigged on their boats as well as some spotlights from the carrier. It was still about the same story. Lurking nearby was the calf. Wayne could see it, a vague shape under the water waiting around at the edge of the men and boats that were gathered around its mother.
It kept spouting, and now it had started a weird crying that Wayne could hear even high up on the deck. A thin keening, and dark all around, except for the pools of light down there in and on the water, and the swells rocking the whalesavers’ boat, and even when Wayne stood there another hour, she wasn’t dead. He was almost frozen by then. The group on deck got smaller and smaller. Finally he had to go, too.
Wayne set his alarm and thought about Anjalee for a long time. He built houses in Ohio for the two of them in his mind. He heard Henderson come in just before he fell asleep.
The clock went off at 0600 and Wayne hit it with his hand and then lay there. It was dark except for a tiny light over LeBonte’s bed, and he wasn’t in the bed. He lay on his back, warm under his wool blanket. He couldn’t hear anything but Henderson doing a slight droning number.
He dressed quietly and put on his pea coat and went back up on the deck. It was very cold. Only a few sailors were out there. Dawn was just breaking and the ship was making a long slow turn under a weak orange light against the horizon, smeared gray clouds over it. The rocking
swells were wide and there was nothing on the horizon but more of them. He looked down. The mother whale was gone, along with the calf. All the navy divers were out of the water. The Greenpeace boat was only a memory now.
“She drowned,” a guy next to Wayne said.
He thought about that. To be born in water and die in it.
“What about the calf?”
“I don’t know, man. I guess it figured we wasn’t cool after we killed its mama.”
The sailor had his hands in his jacket pockets and he motioned toward the water with his elbow.
“One of the Seals, he said he thought it was asking us for help.”
“I heard it,” Wayne said, and he suddenly wanted hot sausage and three over easy and knew he could have them. Toast and jelly. Hash browns. And he was going back to Memphis somehow. When he found her this time, he wasn’t going to let her go.
He kept standing there. He hated to think about it out there in the wide open, a baby, swimming along all by itself, looking for a new pod where it could hang. How would it find others of its own kind? Was it calling to them, even now? He knew they sang to each other, from Iceland to Jamaica. Were the songs bouncing off underwater cliffs that went deep into the water? How did anybody know how far those songs could go?
He just hoped it would live, after all the shit it had gone through. He hoped for that as hard as he’d ever hoped for anything in his life. Not counting kissing Anjalee naked in a bed.
47
Arthur found the instructions pretty easy to follow. The whole thing had cost him $335.00 plus tax and his model was the Pet-Co Surge II, which the pamphlet described as “an ergonomically designed single-piece unit that allows users single finger or thumb pump activation.” There were some cheaper models he could have gotten into as well and for sixty more bucks he could have opted for the top of the line, the Rapid II, which was powered by a “super strong” nine-volt battery motor, and, according to the pamphlet, was “Perfect for men with diminished hand strength.” Somebody about a hundred years old, he guessed, with palsied, shaking fingers, still trying to get it up. Maybe old Mr. Stamp next door had one of those.
He pulled the commode lid down and sat on top of it while he read the instructions and some testimonials from satisfied customers. There were satisfied customers in Cherokee, Alabama, Marion, Arkansas, Dayton, Ohio, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, and he noticed after unpacking everything there in the bathroom that his model had come with an educational videotape and a discreet carrying case. You could take it on vacation. You could pay for one with Medicare. It said so right there in the booklet. He hadn’t known that some of the government’s money was going for stuff like this. U.S. taxpayers shelling out their hard-earned for a hard-on seemed unreasonable, but no more so than paying people not to raise two thousand acres of soybeans or financing studies of studies. He looked again at the couple on the horses. He pictured the guy in the picture doing what he was about to do. The whole thing seemed pretty broke-dick even to somebody as broke-dick as him.
He raised his face and looked at nothing on the wall where the paper was decorated with roses wreathed in vines, red and white and yellow. He was trying to remember what it had felt like the first time they’d done it in Montana. He couldn’t. Maybe it was just time for him to give it up. It wasn’t like it was something he hungered for all the time anyway, now, especially after everything that had happened. He’d felt a lot of humiliation over it, still felt a great deal. But if he wanted to do it with Helen again, what else could he do? It was either Viagra or this. Or an operation.
No.
Maybe he needed a drink first. He didn’t know where Helen was. Her Jag was gone, but sometimes she did some shopping or went to restaurants. He knew she went to the Peabody bar sometimes, too, but he was afraid he’d get mugged on Beale Street.
He held the thing in his hands and looked at it. He saw the rings that were included. He understood that after he got his motor running, he had to put on a ring that would trap the blood until he got through with it. He wondered what would happen if he dozed off while it was still on. Would there be any permanent damage?
Maybe he needed to watch the tape. But how much sense was that going to make, to watch some guy like the one on the horse put himself into a plastic tube and suck all the air out of it? He just didn’t see how it could work. But he was going to try it since he’d paid $335.00 plus tax.
He put it all back in the box except for the tape and hid the rest of it behind the door beneath the vanity. Then he went downstairs.
It was quiet. He looked in the pantry. The kitten was sleeping and Helen had opened the cage door because there was a bowl of cat food in there with it, a full pan of water. Maybe it was going to calm down. Maybe they’d be able to eventually keep it around the house like a regular pet. He hoped so even if he had been attacked and slashed and traumatized by one in his childhood. Maybe Helen would take an interest in it.
He went to the window and looked out to see if it was still snowing. Everybody else did. Everybody else seemed to have a pet or two. Already he missed Jada Pinkett. And Eric even more. Helen seemed to like him a lot, too.
48
“Lord have mercy,” Penelope said. “I dig it when you do that, baby.”
“Do what?” Merlot said, indoor pale and naked as a jaybird beneath her, and then chuckled, his head on the pillow. He took another long lazy lick at her leathery brown nipple and said: “Ooh. You want to look at this, School Nurse?”
She raised up. They were over at her neat little house just north of Water Valley, in the country. He wasn’t ready to take her to his house yet since he was afraid Candy might have shit on the sheets again and wanted to get over there first and make sure Mrs. Poteet had cleaned it up just in case Candy had.
“Is it something wrong, Mister Professor?”
The weed she had was some potent stuff. Had taken it off some stoned Czech dude at the bus station one day. Penelope said keeping it didn’t seem like stealing since it didn’t really belong to anybody anymore unless you wanted to count the entire state, which was actually a whole lot of people who didn’t even know anything about it and never would and wouldn’t miss it, and although individually some of them wouldn’t do it, collectively and regulated by the lawmakers and the people like her paid twice monthly to enforce the rules, the “state” would eventually just pour some kerosene over it one afternoon and set it afire for the fun of it. Merlot said God made pot the same day He made potatoes, according to how you read your Bible.
She had Alejandro Escovedo’s Gravity playing on the big Kenwood speakers she’d paid for with money she’d won playing the slots at Hollywood, in Tunica. There were lots of violins and cellos. The shades were down. They’d done it in the living room on the couch first, then on the kitchen table, and then in the bathtub. It was pretty restful to finally be in the bed. He was about to get sore and red and run dry both, but naturally he didn’t want to stop.
“Uh, School Nurse, yes, I think it’s a small…” He searched for the proper word. “I think you’d have to call it a protuberance. It’s like a small potato. Somewhat elongated.”
She giggled with delight, stoned like him, maybe worse.
“Well, do you think, maybe…Mister Professor…it needs a good massaging?”
“Eh, I think maybe you could palpate it and see.” He giggled some, too.
“Ooh, lover,” she said, all serious, her eyes going serious, ducking to kiss him again. “Ain’t nobody ever made me come the way you do.”
And then she started kissing on his neck again and held him down and grinned at him and pressed her lips close and started blowing against his skin so that her lips vibrated and made noises like somebody passing gas uncontrollably while he flapped his arms and shouted happily for her to quit it!
49
Anjalee woke and stretched and yawned. It was quiet, with only the hissing of the heat coming through the ceiling vents. She didn’t know what time it was. They’d stayed
at the casino until three. He’d won big at blackjack. Very big. About forty-five hundred.
She was alone in the bed. She found her cigarettes and lighter on the bedside table and turned the lamp on. A few glasses that sat in rings of water held the remnants of drinks. Ashtrays with stubbedout cigarette butts wearing her lipstick. She lit a fresh one and pulled the pillow up behind her and then got the other one and propped it back there, too. She stretched and yawned a long slow yawn with the cigarette in her fist.
She looked for a clock and finally saw on a small brown box some luminous red letters that read 11:47. Almost lunchtime, and she was hungry. She wondered if he’d paid the hotel bill before he left. If he hadn’t, she’d have to sneak out.
There was a thick red robe with the hotel monogram on it hanging in one of the closets and she put it on and tied it around her and went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth. She was rinsing out her mouth and spitting into the sink when she heard the doorbell ring. She stopped and shut off the water. What if it was the cops?