We are riding again, Mercury tearing the highway air out of itself. Mary's looking fine in a T-shirt. I'm in one, too. We're up to some kind of redneck act, it seems.
At an interstate picnic rest area, we saw an alligator eating golf balls. A woman was opening the door of an RV and tossing out one golf ball at a time to the alligator. I stood there and watched in my Stump suit. Between tosses a second woman came out of nowhere and started reading me the riot act about endangered species and federal animal-welfare acts and I helplessly protested. She would not believe I had nothing to do with the feeding. "Watch that trailer," I told her. Nothing happened.
I knocked on the RV. A man opened the door. A hairy gut hung out, which forced his T-shirt to ride up to his chest. "Forget it, pal," he said.
"Forget what?"
"Whatever crap you are." He slammed the door.
I walked back to Mrs. Audubon. "See?" I said.
"I already saw, just like I said," she said.
I return to the consummate logic of flying in the Mercury, mixing drinks in midair, taking life's lab notes. There is no misunderstanding like that golfball business between the back seat and front. Mary adjusts the rearview mirror until our eyes meet; she's ordering a light tonic with a lot of lime. She stops the car and freshens up in a rest room, comes out with new lipstick and her hair brushed back: the four-o'clock double, no lime. She drives. I serve drinks to the driver.
About this time I join her in the front, and until dark we are at our touristy best, watching Florida's sandy glare become Florida's neon evening. One of us comes up with something to say, usually by gesture alone, about Chico's Monkey Emporium, Floyd's Go-Cart Royale, a Hep-Ur-Sef station, the Daytona Pamplona (a Cuban disco, we think). A club advertising music by Maurice and the Fucking Parrots is too much: Mary takes her foot off the accelerator as we pass it. We look at each other. The club's marquee actually proclaims;TONIGHT: MAURICE AND THE FUCKING PARROTS.
Maurice and the Fucking Parrots are the worst band you could assemble with human musicians, or parrot musicians, for that matter, and we dance for hours. We rest in the car, watching the clear skies darken, the crushed-shell parking lot begin to whiten with a light of its own, peaceful as the moon. The night is ruined so aggressively, so eagerly, so thoroughly by Maurice's horrible music that it is somehow made perfect.
We rescue ourselves FInally at two with the Mercury's powerful rumble and surge into the chilled highway air. Mary throws her head back and to the side, lips parted, silent actress awaiting a kiss. We stop on an undeveloped piece of A1A and walk into some low dunes with Stump's navy blankets.
"Balance the books tomorrow," she says. It is an odd note.
* * *
We got up the next morning to a changed world-to a new act, I might should say. I do not know whether to blame-blame is not the word, let's say to hold accountable-Maurice and the Fucking Parrots or not. We got up, normal as you please, greasy-faced from a night of Atlantic sand and wind, ready for a day-rate room and some rest, and Mary took the stage.
"Al, make a check for two thousand. To yourself."
I am writing today, not in the Mercury, but beside a plywood stand selling key-lime pies. I have eaten two slices of pie to justify writing on a picnic table beside the pie stand, but am drawing suspicious looks all the same. The girl in the stand has a tape player. We have just heard Freddie Fender sing of "wasted days and wasted nights." Now Diana Ross of "no mountain high enough."
We had taken the motel room, showered, and I sat down near the door. Mary sat on the bed, her arms on her knees, leaning toward me like a father. "There's nothing personal in this," she said.
"In what?"
"You can take the Merc or the two thousand."
I looked at her, and the color TV, on a stand about eye level with me. I mulled this one over until I found myself playing with my lips and stopped.
"I understand," I said. What was odd was that I believe I did understand. She was closing a very successful road show and meant for us, as actors, to move on. And she was clever enough to fold following a packed-house night rather than when the play was in trouble.
"What about Stump's wardrobe?" I said.
"I'll take it if you want a new one."
I pictured myself in the clothes I would get from the nearest Stuckey's-monkey T-shirts treated with Tris, orange surfing trunks coming to my knees-and said I'd keep Stump's if it was all right. It was more unnatural, in her scheme of things, for her to reclaim her husband's tattered clothes than for me to simply wear them out.
"Okay." She got up and signed a check and came over to me and bent at the waist and rolled her forehead across mine, back and forth, holding my neck, like inking a thumb for fingerprints, and walked out the door with a jangle of keys, a swift solid car door, a blast, a reverse, a small rock skid, gentle rubbery crushing of stone.
The check for two thousand dollars was beside the ice bucket. I kept the door open, letting natural light in, while I showered again and watched TV and otherwise took advantage of the room until checkout. I expected to feel abandoned or lonely, but I did not, exactly. I felt I had observed the terms of our dramatic no-bio creed and was a fine performer and had no call to long for anything under the sun. And it still hurt, some.
Adjacent to the motel was the key-lime pie stand, looking like four plywood Ping-Pong tables thrown into an A-frame, housing a pasty-faced girl you might see at a trailer park. I ate the two slices of pie at a picnic table and looked at the highway.
A bus came along and let a load of tourists have at the key-lime pie stand, and I got on. Heading west, through what I think was once Everglades, we passed a HELP WANTED sign and I got off. I walked down a white graded road to a fish camp. The building was small and low, suggesting an I enclosed trailer. It had plywood floors and a plywood ceiling, about head high. Down the longest reach of the joint a woman was throwing darts. She was not throwing them at a dart board and she was not throwing. them with the deft, wristy, English toss. She was letting them go like Bob Feller, lead leg higher than her head. On the wall forty feet away was a target painted in crude circles. The bull's-eye alone was big as a bowling ball.
When she finished up the set, I said, "Is there a job here?"
"Ho!" she said, plucking the darts loose. She went behind the bar. She got a beer and slid it to me and took one herself. She broke her pop top without opening the beer, and holding a dart dagger-style, she neatly collapsed the tab with one punch.
"These things changed my world," she said. She flicked the ring off the bar to the floor.
I nodded. I looked out the door, to the water. There was a fallen dock, and tied to it some wooden rowboats sunk to gunwales. They looked like alligators.
"So," she said. "Drink all you want, eat if you want to, don't give any customers a hard time."
"That's it?"
She didn't answer, except to wipe the bar with a ribbed towel which she flopped around like leavening bread. Certain parallels-equivalences were in a lab instead of a fish camp, in a true reaction series rather than life's-were stunning. Instead of a pool shark, before me stood some kind of major-league dart pitcher. Where there had been gin, there was beer. And it looked as though the same no-questions, no-lies ambience was going to operate.
I suddenly saw that Mary had truly acted according to the constants and coefficients and activities and affinities of the whole series of reactions around me defining this odd interlude. She "left me" with no more wrongful or sorrowful moment than an atom leaves another, than blood becomes iron and oxygen. And I was the evolving product, now in a fish-camp retort with a new reagent not unlike-in fact, startlingly similar to-the last. Who governed these combinations? How could it all be a random walk?