Dale Mae was down the way and Mr. Albemarle moved along the way. Who was going to buy hot ice cream? Who, all along the watchtower, was going to buy anything? There was no one all along the watchtower, so far, except the sodiers, the aliens of affection, and now Dale Mae. Mr. Albemarle looked around to see if perchance anyone was watching and pushed the cart of bubbling ice cream — it smelled cloyingly sweet — over the edge of the watchtower into the moat, brushing his hands together briskly as if he’d handily completed a nasty task. He whistled a happy tune, one that appeared to be random notes, and sauntered all along the watch-tower.
Mr. Albemarle stopped his whistling and sauntering in mid-blow and mid-step. He had an old-fashioned crisis. He was suddenly transfixed by one of the old human anti-verities: he had no idea what he was doing, or was supposed to do. Pal with sodiers, let aliens of affection feel you up, romp with a Dale Mae, push boiling ice cream into a moat — these things you did in life because they came along. You did them. You even did them well, if you cared to — Dale Mae said the worm of his passion was exquisitely twisted. But so what? What of it? What then? What now? What point?
He stood there feeling slump-shouldered and low. He had a vision of a different kind of life. There were men who, say, ran car dealerships and bought acreage and had their friends out to shoot quail and they all drank out of these Old-Fashioned glasses with pheasants painted on them, painted “by hand” it said in the expensive mail-order catalogue the car-dealer quail-shooter’s wife ordered the glasses out of. The wife and the other wives were in the kitchen discussing what the wives of car dealers and bankers and brokers discuss. They were wearing pleated Bermuda shorts and none of them was too fat. The men were content with them, even loved them, and did not have affairs too much. The men laughed easily among themselves at things that were not too funny. Mr. Albemarle was outside this, all of this.
He knew that were he inside it, the point-of-life problem might not be resolved, but he knew it would not, if he were drinking Wild Turkey and talking Republican politics, come up. From his vantage and distance, quail glasses and okaying the deficit might well be exactly the point of life, he could not tell. But he was certain that he — all along the watchtower, with (accidentally) a woman who could (incidentally) shoot the quail but who would (certainly) shoot the quail glasses also — was never going to get the point. He was, he realized, standing there looking at the ball. He did not see that it helped anything. If you paused to look at the ball, you were going to be tackled for no gain, or for a loss; whereas if you just at least ran, you stood a chance of gaining yardage. That you had no idea what a yard meant was no argument to lose yardage, or was it? How had he gotten to walking all along the watchtower? Was it not a losing of yardage? Was being on the watchtower with a woman who could probably shoot the painted quail off a glass without breaking the glass not somehow the negative image of life on the plantation, where the plantation had nothing planted on it but feed for the birds who would be painted on the glasses lovingly held and admired as symbols of the good life? At this cerebration Mr. Albemarle was forced to sit down and say, “Whew!” He’d had, he thought, some kind of epiphany. “Whew!” he said again. It helped.
“What’s wrong with you?” Dale Mae said, scaring him. He’d not heard her come up. He wondered if the watchtower was getting softer, or something.
“Nothing,” he said. “If I threw a hand-painted quail glass in the air, could you shoot the paint off it without breaking the glass?”
“Do it all the time,” Dale Mae said. “Problem is catching the glass. That’s hard. Usually you get you a party of car dealers and brokers to shag ’em. Out there in their Filson pants and Barbour coats, pumping hell-for-leather through the gorse, flushing actual quail. There are ironies.”
Mr. Albemarle looked at her hard. Either she was demonic and had possessed his brain or something else of a weird and too intimate nature was going on.
“Where are the wives?” he asked.
“What wives?”
“To the glass catchers.”
“In the kitchen with Dinah strummin’ on the old banjo.”
“Thought so.”
“Let’s get us some ice cream.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I rolled the cart into the moat.”
“You what?”
“Well, it was boiled ice cream. Did you want boiled ice cream?”
“No. I want hard cold ice cream.”
“Me too.”
Like that, they were together, hand in hand, strolling all along the watchtower looking for ice cream proper, Mr. Albemarle’s epiphany behind him.
They walked by the writing desk where Mr. Albemarle had left instructions for the phantom secretary to mail his one thousand letters it seemed just seconds before, and the desk was covered in vines. He remarked on it to Dale Mae.
“Heart mildew,” Dale Mae said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s what grows on sites of affection. If you’d left that desk alone, or left a real letter on it that was to be mailed to one thousand people for whom you never had or expected to have affection, there’d be no vine on it. Your letter, lame-o one that it is, brings on the jungle. Am I on that mailing list?”
“Not yet. I only have the brokenhearted on that list.”
“A thousand?”
“Well, I rounded up.”
“As well you might. As well might we all. It is a proposition of such close tolerances, at least before the parts are worn out from friction, that pairing a thousand bolts to a thousand nuts does not seem excessive. Consider thread count, mismatched metals—”
“Dale Mae, could we talk about something else?”
“Sure, baby. What?”
“I once threw away a Craftsman circular saw when all that was wrong with it was a broken tooth on a drive gear. This, the whole-thing throwing away, was a waste. I regret it. That whole saw — motor, blade, and all — in a plastic garbage bag, now in a landfill, I guess, with its bad gear nearby somewhere in the great noncomposting amalgam of jetsam, if you have jetsam on land, or flotsam, I don’t know the difference, but anyway it, the saw, in its exploded view (I did not reassemble it) is packed into some clayey sand with whatever else I threw away with it and whatever else other people threw away that day, and there are seagulls flying overhead so maybe it’s fair to call the saw flotsam, or jetsam, where you have gulls you have salvage, just as where you have smoke you have fire.”
“Is that it?” Dale Mae asked.
“No. That is the tip of the lettuce. I once took four baby cardinals from their nest in a relocation program of my own devising. They, the hairless little blue pterodactyls, were to be moved to a ‘safer’ place, God knows where. For this transport they were placed on a wooden paddle of the sort you are to strike a rubber ball with repeatedly as it returns to the paddle via an elastic band. I have blocked the name of the toy.”
“Fly Back,” Dale Mae said.
“The birds,” Mr. Albemarle said, “peeping and squalling, were red-skinned and blue-blooded underneath the fine cactusy down on them, giving them a purple scrotal texture until they fell off into an ant bed. The kind of squirming they did, which made me unable (afraid) to cup them on the paddle, did not look radically different from the kind of writhing they did once they fell off and the ants were on them, but it was. They writhed to death, the baby cardinals, right there at my feet, at the foot of the tree in which their erstwhile happy safe home sat empty but for the hysterical parents flitting in and out. Right there at my feet, except I slunk my feet off somewhere to contemplate what went wrong, how the little bastards should have known better than to scare me like that.”