“There’s a phone truck parked down the street,” I said.
“A man came by and said to let it ring while they fixed it.” She looked up, her face blank.
“I taught Carl to ride,” I said.
She stood at the sink with her hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, wearing an old loose sundress and sandals. She dried a tomato and set it beside two others on the porcelain drainboard beside the sink. Behind her on the stove the potato halves rose and tumbled like the blunt noses of tiny white whales.
“Supper’s almost done,” she said.
It was dusk outside, the sky a deep dark blue, a thin line of pale pink above the tree line high in the darkening window. The glaring overhead light in the kitchen cast an odd glow on things. It made her skin look weirdly smooth, like a doll’s. I looked at my hands. Skin and veins stretched taut over bone and muscle. The phone rang. It rang again. And then it stopped. We stood waiting for it to start again. She stood at the sink looking down. I went over to her and touched her arm. I felt her stiffen. I put my arm across her shoulders and tried to hug her to me.
“Don’t,” she said.
I pulled her closer, but she stiffened.
“Don’t make a scene,” she said. “Carl’s outside.” I looked but didn’t see anyone outside the window. Then I saw someone sitting in the fork of the cherry tree, just a silhouette in the failing light. A bike lay on its side in the grass. I looked back at Lanny, let her go. She stared at the tomatoes on the drainboard. I looked again at the figure in the tree. It was hunkered down on a branch. A shape not sharp but vague in the faint light, shading darker in almost clocklike moments. With the kitchen light on, through the screen, you couldn’t tell who it was.
“That’s not Carl,” I said.
“What?”
“Carl’s riding,” I said. “Must be some other boy, spying. Maybe it’s Toot’s boy.” I leaned toward the window. “Go on, now,” I called. It sat still. Too small for Toot’s boy.
She looked at it, closed her eyes, and rested her palms against the sink.
“Ben,” she said.
It didn’t move at all.
“What are we going to do about him?” she said.
I looked at the figure in the tree.
“Carl?” I called.
No answer.
“I don’t think it’s Carl,” I said.
Lanny shook her head and turned away. The child in the tree had not moved.
“Carl?” I called out. “Come on in the house.”
It sat very still.
“Carl,” I said louder.
It was a still, dark statue.
Out front in the street a clamor clapped up. The members of the Road Hog Club, quick shadows in the deepening dark, rode in a furious circle, slapping their mouths with their hands and whooping like movie Indians.
I cut the light to see through the bay-window glass. They broke and curved out of sight. I didn’t see Carl. Out back, a soft scrabbling and clatter. When I looked, the tree was empty.
We stood, not saying anything, looking out at the tree.
Slowly, sounds came back to our ringing ears. The gurgle of the boiling potatoes in the pot. The quiet hum of the refrigerator motor. The flutter and quiet hiss of the stove eye’s blue flame. Lanny reached over and turned it off. The flame snuffed out with a little popping sound. She turned off the oven and I heard the jets chuff once, then the metal crackling and ticking. I could hardly see her face in the darkness.
She said, “You don’t even know your own son,” and walked out through the dining room.
I heard the front screen door open and shut. I heard her lift her voice out in the street.
“Carl?” she called.
I was thinking about the time I stole in on Carl asleep and watched him until he seemed some child I didn’t know, some beautiful foundling.
And the nights I lay awake beside Lanny like someone moving through dark space at high speed.
“Carl,” she called. “Carl?”
Moving away, growing fainter, her calling like a birdsong you know by heart but never knew which bird sang it. I stood very still and listened, as if to memorize her voice, fix it in my memory. But she’d gone too far down the street by then. And there were actual birds, outside the window in the yard, singing in the onset of evening.
Alamo Plaza
THE ROAD TO THE COAST WAS A LONG, STEAMY CORRIDOR of leaves. Narrow bridges over brush-choked creeks. Our father drove, the windows down, wind whipping his thick black hair. Our mother’s hair, abundant and auburn and long and wavy, she’d tried to tame beneath a pretty blue scarf. He wore a pair of black Ray-Bans. She wore prescription shades with the swept and pointed ends of the day. He whistled crooner songs and smoked Winstons, and early as it was, no one really talked.
This was before things changed, before Hurricane Camille, the casinos.
My older brother, Hal, slept sitting up, his mouth open as if he were singing silently in a dream. My younger brother, Ray, had been left with our grandmother, too young for this trip, too much trouble most of the time. He was two, and the youngest of three, and his sharp, hawkish eyes constantly sought their prey, which was inattention, which he would rip to shreds with tantrums, devour in small bloody satisfying chunks of punishment and mollification. I was so very glad that he was not along.
By noon we smelled the brine-and-fish stink of the bays. The land flattened into hazy vista, so flat you could see the curve of the earth. Downtown Gulfport steamed an old Floridian vapor from cracked sidewalks. Filigreed railings, shaded storefronts, not a soul out, everyone and everything stalled in the heat, distilling. The beach highway stretched out to the east, white and hot in the sun. Our tires made slapping sounds on the melting tar dividers and the wind in the car windows was warm and salty. We passed old beach mansions with green shutters, hundred-year-old oaks in the yards. A scattering of cheap redbrick motels, slatboard restaurants, bait shops. The beach, to our right, was flat and white and the lank brown surf lapped at the sand.
The Alamo Plaza Motel Court’s white stucco fort facade stood flanked by low regular motel rooms around a concrete courtyard. The swimming pool lay oddly naked and exposed in the middle of the motel’s broad front lawn, one low diving board jutting over the deep end like a pirates’ plank.
We stopped in the breezeway beside the office and went inside where the floor was cool Mexican tile, lush green plants in large clay pots in the corners, and a color television on which we could watch, late afternoons and evenings after supper before bedtime, programs unavailable back home. I have a vivid memory of watching a Tarzan movie there in which Tarzan, standing in the crook of a large tree, is shot right between the eyes by a safari hunter’s rifle, and he doesn’t even flinch. Is it possible this is a true memory, not invented or stretched? Would even Hollywood in the thirties — for this was an old movie even then — have Tarzan being shot directly in the forehead with a high-power rifle, the bloody spot at the point of entry jumping out on his skin, and him not even blinking his eyes? I was, I am, as incredulous as the safari men on the jungle trail below, holding their high-power rifles and gaping at this jungle god, who just stared coolly back at them with the bullet hole in the center of his forehead.
WE RENTED A BUNGALOW in the rear of the Plaza. In the mornings we went to the beach, joining hands to cross the white concrete path of U.S. 98, the beach highway, to the concrete steps that led down to the beach on the Sound. It was not an exhilarating beach, as Gulf beaches go, its white sand dredged from beyond the barrier islands twenty miles out to cover the naturally muddy shore, where the natural flora included exposed roots of cypress and mangrove. Huge tarpon, an almost prehistoric-looking fish, cruised here between the river and the sea.