KOPLIK wrung out the handkerchief, wrapped it around fresh ice, and returned it.
“Your color’s coming back,” he said.
The tall secretary with the gray streak dividing her bangs was right behind, bent in some unfinished gesture.
“I’m sorry,” Larvell said. “I don’t want to make trouble.”
“God, don’t apologize.”
Koplik squeezed Larvell’s shoulder; the girl straightened up, nodding.
“Hey, the stress thing. We all know what that’s like. Sure, aim high, eye on the prize. But then you get all wired in and you’re running around like an insect.” Koplik drew up his mouth at the corners. “Where’s the payoff?”
“With me it’s a caffeine addiction.” That big girl was still nodding. “And also refined sugars.”
Koplik fingered his inside pocket. “Don’t apologize. Really.”
“I’m going for acupuncture,” the girl said.
Larvell got up to go. He had the beige sport coat over his arm like a robber concealing a gun. He declined the taxi Koplik was insistent on phoning for. The outside air was heavy and thick, and it didn’t have to sneak up behind you. Here was the company logo in brushed chrome on a black marble slab, and then all this lawn with rollings built in, and thin trees put down like game markers.
DRIVING till sunset, then sleeping jackknifed on the back seat until dawn. Crossing over the big river at Vicksburg, going down through Madison Parish, Lake Bruin, Waterproof, Cocodrie. It seemed important to have honest clothes — cotton T-shirt, denim pants, canvas shoes — and to throw the old things away. Slowing down along the blacktop to recognize that planing mill with its rust-sprung roof fallen in, Haney’s tar-papered barbecue place, the Pig Stand, and the four elms where you turned off to go midnight swimming. Larvell stopped the car and he could hear the underbrush whisper. This had all been Gannet land, leased for cotton from the Texas & Pacific. Junior Gannet shot up his leg hunting snipe from a horse. Lee Leon Gannet gave him the Esso station to run. It went from squinting weather into haze. The road stayed empty. They’d made a catchment and put in a boat ramp for sportsmen. Before, the land made a natural levee reinforced by trees. Each man would have his trees flagged, and he owned those trap lines, going out through mist after a cool night to pull his wire traps up out of the mud, shake the crawdads out, bait them back up with chicken guts. The road had a few sail-rabbits, which meant any creature squashed flat and dried hard enough to pick up and skim through the air. Right across from where Larvell ran out of gas, let the car half skew down a kudzu bank, was the spot where Cal Stark and his big brother wanted to build the Monterey Assembly of God Church. Ground’s too soft, and too far out in the woods, Lee Leon said, and it was his money. Cal Stark had a little fifteen-minute morning radio show on WNTZ sponsored by Bluebelle Vanilla Wafers. He sang a Jim Reeves ballad, gave the weather, did something uptempo with flat-picking, read an item of human interest from the news, always finished with a hymn. Cal finally married Gail Fullham, who played piano in the cinder-block church her uncle went and put up right in town. She answered every altar call, and spoke in the unknown tongues. Larvell came down two years ago when Orris Mitchell got married to a Fullham cousin — he and Mitch had run around Houston together when they were young, worked construction, sold used cars. Mitch told how on the far bank of the Tensas, up by Ray’s Bluff, cows would get loose and wander over on the drag strip that had gone in there like they had an old memory passed down in the blood. Because Wimp Gannet pasturing out there took you way, way back. Lee Haney ran his still about that same time, a fifty-gallon unit in a cave back under the bluff, and they’d be in there tending the firebox, tapping the petcock, eating side meat and corn fritters from a black iron skillet. Lee had Choctaw blood. Bit off a treasury man’s nose, died in prison. Airborne seed fluff went by. Someone tended the footpath. Larvell, mounting to the little cemetery in the trees, said something under his breath.
BUDDED ON EARTH TO BLOOM IN HEAVEN
Baby Langston, just two, from croup. The limestone marker with a lamb carved in. Weeds pulled and leaf trash swept by. Higher ground. Solid ground and plain truth. My kinsmen have gone away. Aunt Lucille never played cards or went to a movie, said a woman shouldn’t smell but of lye soap.
1891–1965
PEACE AT LAST IN HIS ARMS
Moss in the pipe rail joints, geraniums wilting in a big tomato can. Gannet land, red dirt. Pop dug up an arrow point and said it was Indian mounds. Wagging his finger, learn to follow your trail through life without leaving one. Be tested, be brave. Clipping from the Beaumont paper on a derrick fire victim named Roy Moore, 53. She said it might be another one, not our Roy. Scolding the molasses on her greens, the sugar diabetes and the blubber on her hips. A continuous test of faith. Set a crucible in the fire, and let it be a refining fire. Cut amber beads on her dresser. Satin pillows and a mansion on the hill.
WILMETTE JUNE GANNET MOORE LOVING MEMORIES
Larvell said something under his breath.
A TALE OF NO MORE DEMANDS
UNAVOIDABLY, ALWAYS, HUMMING SPIDERS and iridescent lichen brought notice of spring to the domain. A great sigh, and the people said, well, of course, yes, again. Off came the shutters, and the lids from the water troughs. Hedgerows were unlimbered from burlap. In the high unthawed meadows llamas agreed to prolonged sleep, and in warm blue inland lagoons the triggerfish were through practicing. At the palace, modest in size really, with its glass moat and untruculent sandstone battlements, modest for all to see — at his palace, Francois Rogelio IV, Emperor, puttered with chapel furnishings.
Delivered from the twenty-one interminable days of winter, he now could say, please, no more demands on my time. Tradition, unquestioned, though it lent discernible advantage to no one, made winter the season for petitioners and supplicants. Day and night they came — old men from the desert with performing horses, a firewalker, tumblers, women who told the future with nails, with dung, a farmer’s boy who had glazed a microscopic likeness of Ilse, the Concubine, inside an almond shell — all desiring but his tiniest gesture of acknowledgment.