Across this happy-face moment would then waft a small cloud of the real, and we'd step back abruptly A and get another beer and realize we were broke, Bonaparte was hopeless, and the sole rescue was hundreds of customers who wanted boats we did not have, fish no one could show them to, hospitality we were fundamentally opposed to granting. Then we'd have a fourth beer, and then it was, well before noon, altogether too bright to look at Bonaparte for any longer than you'd look directly at the sun itself if someone told you it was in lunar eclipse. I would prepare myself for the unlikely advent of customers by placing on my arm an imaginary green towel of the sort I'd worn when Mary and I worked at the beach club.
It was in all a wonderful time that I knew even during the nose-pinching smallness of it I would remember as fondly as you remember certain mean periods of your life and come to love them for the meanness. Wallace I respected as a soldier-a person who would have gone to West Point and been a rogue general who, despite a career of insubordination, won; or a middling prizefighter who won on indomitability alone. Instead, she had a bone·apart child and a fishless fish camp and bottomless boats and won by strategic, stubborn refusal to accede to. . to what? I did not know: I do not know. She refused to ask for any relief-it was as if what she wanted was not a break but one more triaclass="underline" one more dart in the plywood of her ordeal. And that dart she wanted implanted, solidly, stuck into the heart of the whole losing proposition.
I could not even figure, while I ate it, where the bologna we had for lunch came from. The meat may have been in the chest freezer that Bonaparte froze his crabs in. I never looked in it, because the one time I thought to, it was slept upon by a placid cat with one dusty eyeball goggling out, actually touching the rusty top of the freezer. I saw no cause to wake him. You don't disturb a cat like that to see bologna.
Performing my silent duties as valet to the nearly hypothetical customer, I got to feeling that while Wallace might be set up for the next dart of oppression, I was not, and I hardly saw how my not scaring a couple of couples before they had two beers each could possibly equal my consuming nearly as much bologna as Bonaparte-he was voracious-and I decided to get out before the next dark dart struck. In fact, it occurred to me that I had been it-the next dart-when I arrived. And now we all awaited the next profitless windfall. These were the events that Bonaparte tracked, perhaps, with his head cockings and whistlings and St. Vitusing out under the broken green-shaded light at the end of the dock.
"Wallace, write me a check for fifteen hundred dollars and I'll give you one for two thousand and you can get him a boat. I'm going."
She turned to me, sucking the finger she burned turning the rising mounds of bologna. Bonaparte did not like punctures. "What?"
"Sambo rumbles."
"Kiss my ass."
She turned back to the stove. I got my grocery bag of Stump's duds and left, passing Bonaparte in the marsh checking his crab traps.
At the end of the white, graded road where I'd gotten off the bus, nothing had changed, which somehow surprised me. I expected to see even the same bus come barreling down on me from the same direction I had ridden it. I was stunned to be standing where I had stood, and exactly as I had stood before, except for the passage of time at the camp, as if I were a boat sunk to my nose and bailing myself out with all the efficacy of Bonaparte up to his chin. You can feel odd standing in a sudden swarm of deerflies-having just thrown darts for a month with a woman you've left with her retarded kid-rippling sawgrass as far as the eye can see, razory salty wheat.
Air brakes caught me dreaming. Before me was the same bus, the same driver. I got on. He smiled at me as if I were a traveling salesman returning from a joke. I offered a hundred-dollar bill for the fare and took the smirk off his face.
"Napoleon musta got one dry," he said, expecting me to share with him the lunacy of my days at the camp. I did not. I heard a faint, shrill whistle from behind the bus as we were getting going. Wallace was nailing up the HELP WANTED sign and Bonaparte was whistling and listening vigorously. Then, from too far to tell for sure, I swear he dropped trou and mooned the bus. The driver was looking in his side mirror, but his expression gave no clue.
In Naples I got heroic. I paid for Sears' top-of-the-line johnboat and had it delivered. And I got it in my head to go home.
How so nutty a notion took hold of me I can only guess. Throwing darts through Pine-Sol fumes or reading amateur playscripts for a living sets you up for a broadsiding by any crack-brained thing that comes along remotely redolent of the practical or normal or responsible, I suppose. And so I decided to go home, and I also decided to impress the bus driver by writing as we flew up the backside of Florida. I acquired another notebook from a newsstand in a bus station, and I carried it past the driver with a processional gravity, as if I were a priest. I am still in a kind of cold war with the bus driver.
I have written on a wire table, in a Mercury, at an ammoniac fish camp, and now on a Big Red bus out of Naples, Florida, barreling up the murky coast of Florida, going to see my old man. He and my mother live in Lafayette in a mansion. There will be liquor, and insults regarding my not taking over the oil-field-supply business.
It is impossible to believe that whatever Mary trained me for, or whatever I sought the day I broke rank, is coming to a visit with my old man. Nothing is less agreeable.
I'd better rethink this whole business. I'm now in the position, after all, of missing connections. It is easy to stop in Tallahassee, take too long walking to see the capitol dome, miss the bus for Mobile, and take the one for Quitman.
Show up in Quitman and start from there. Nothing is easier, or harder, than that.
* * *
My second day a-bus. Certain things are becoming clear. At 10:30 this morning in Chipley, Florida, I entered a Suwannee Swifty and bought a red T-shirt, a large Big Red soda water, and resumed my seat directly over the bus-side exhortation to GO BIG RED. This theater made me the envy of two children who got on the bus, to whom I gave the soft drink. It worked; I "became someone" through a maneuver of artificial staging. I need more funky shirts, more improbable women, more nerve. We head south, to the Gulf, non-express. Carrabelle flies by in a town-sized convection current.
The red shirt stinks of cheap dye.
The bus glides.
The girl who got on at Niceville I tell I'm a songwriter, and my new song, "I'm Happy to Be the One That's Mostly on Top of You," I'm going to dedicate to her.
"Say whut?"
The bus has taken an unexpected stop-for a flat, being attended to now by a Montgomery Ward truck-in Panacea. I enter Eastside Beverage. A white man is saying to a black named Augusta (from his work-shirt embroidery), "He is a nice snake." Augusta says, "Don't start on me that shit." "I'll show you," the proprietor says, heading for the back. Augusta gets off his stool, ready to run, full of mock fear and a little true fear.
The proprietor returns with a cigar box, opens it: a boxful of snapshots.