“You’ve changed, but not much,” he said, and we both watched the crayfish on his finger as if it were the speaker. It was fine with me if it were. I had the sudden conviction there were plenty of things I did not want to know about this man. They were things that would disappoint me in my heroic memory of him as suitor to my mother, superior to Odysseus, as mentor to me, superior to Mentor.
He was smaller than I’d thought, but it was the knotted-down, dangerous-looking smallness of frame that you do not fuck with. And this looking-at-the-table business did not seem to indicate shyness so much as don’t fuck with me. I couldn’t think of a damned thing to say.
So we sat there. I thought we were like a couple of guys who’d get on better in the presence of women, but that meant one of them would be, in the likely neighborhood of our short history, my mother, and that didn’t seem to be the kind of thing I had in mind. I couldn’t get a fix on his age. He was in a flannel shirt. His hands were worked, thumbs suggesting small lobster claws. My hands were, and are, women’s hands, approximately.
“Come on,” he said.
He stopped at a glass cooler by the bar and removed two six-packs of beer from it and did not wait for acknowledgment from anyone, just left. I looked around to ratify this purchase, if it was one, and no one paid me any mind. His truck was moving when I got in it. “Better get your car,” he said, and I did that and followed him.
We went somewhere and somewhere else and somewhere and somewhere else, as if I were being kidnapped blindfolded. I had no idea where we were when we stopped and parked in a limestone cul-de-sac, the graded stone road looking phosphorescent in the moonlight, and got in a pirogue. It had a small forward deck on which was a dead nutria. As we motored the canal of some sort, I mezzed out on this nutria. Its tail was the size of a giant carrot and it had a dusky finely wrinkled skin like the callus on an old dog’s elbow, but it had hair coming out of it like fine stiff black wire. Or like the fiber inside moss, the dried core they used to stuff furniture with that you virtually cannot break. We went a long way on this canal, or these canals, or whatever they were, with the same you-might-as-well-be-blindfolded sense obtaining. I thought I might as well relax.
Life itself was, as I had been leading it, a blindfolded — volitionally in my case — affair. Were I not seeking the blindfold I’d have been already working in Atlanta or having a brotherly man-to-man with my father over some fine point in the management of my Republican portfolio. I was in a plywood boat with a giant dead rodent leading the darkly way. In the old days you got by Cerberus, the three-headed dog. Today you got by Nutria, the one-headed rat. Charon was a man who didn’t speak, didn’t look at you, slept with your mother, you thought, you hoped, once, but now you wondered what kind of queer desire it was to hope a man, any man other than your father — no, including your father — had slept with your mother. Who should sleep with your mother? Should anyone? The answer, in a bayou with barred owl accompanying us head-high in the tupelo gums and a hint of goner funk coming off the just-stiff nutria bowsprit, seemed to be no. No one should sleep with your mother. Ever. This would eliminate you and your problems.
I got a beer and enjoyed the ride. I saw a moccasin the size of a fat Schwinn tire, his white eye band bright off the water like a big smile. And I’m sure he was smiling: we were all out there in a moon-bright bayou, lost souls smiling in our lostness, the dead nutria the most content, but all of us having a very good time. This is what bayou and beer and lovers of your mother will have you believe, at night. In the daytime, of course, yanh yanh yanh …
20
WE GOT TO A HOUSE on stilts in a row of houses on stilts, a Main Street, of sorts, of black water. Access to this little town was decidedly by boat, or helicopter, if that wouldn’t blow the houses down, and it looked as if it would. Ours was two stories high, but the first story was stilts and the building itself was only seven feet floor to ceiling and, like the pirogue, seemed made entirely of plywood. Then I noticed parts of it were cardboard and other parts rusted-out screen. It fairly thundered when we walked in, and bent and gave, trampoline-like. It had a refrigerator that looked about fifty years old, with thick round ivory shoulders, about the size and bulk of a safe. A yellow bug light came on inside it when opened, and I noticed all the lights in the house, and, later, in the town itself, were yellow.
Taurus, if that was to be his name again, let me take it in and said, “Some nurses are coming by in a bit.”
“What?”
“Nurses.”
“Nurses?”
“Yes.” He went into a small room and left me with this prospect. Did he mean nurses in a figurative sense, in which case they could be outright whores as long as they cured you, and in which case he was joking as well as my father and his clan might joke, or did he mean it literally? You could only hope he meant nurses. I was in the epicenter of a time and place where no questions should be asked, or thought I was, not unreminiscent of the times I’d had with this man before, when things were so obscure and adult around me and him that I chose to be a kind of passive radio receiver of the signals of enigma swirling around. He came back through to the yellow-blaring refrigerator, and I toyed with the radio philosophy a bit: “What for?”
“What what for?”
“The nurses.”
“Health.”
There you go. Answers to questions in these radio-silence zones of human endeavor constitute diminishing returns. Do not ask. Prepare for nurses. How to prepare for nurses? Get a beer. Get sick. Lie down. Look feeble.
I did all this, feeling fine on a kind of bamboo sofa overlooking the bayou, or whatever we’d come in on, the town’s twenty or so pirogues sticking out into it like teeth from a comb, I with no idea if this town was for fishing or receiving nurses or pursuing nutria or what. But this was “out there,” and it felt good, not unlike I used to feel as a child in our house on the Atlantic, which by now was altogether suburban. There were some flies on their backs on the windowsill, quaintly dead. A pirogue motored along and paused, and a man took the nutria off the bow of ours and put it on the bow of his and motored on with the same want of circumspection Taurus had used taking the beer in the bar. It was dark, but the man appeared to be made of rust.
“Small problem,” Taurus called from the room he’d gone into again. “Yours is large. But young.”
“Young?”
“Under thirty.”
“Large?”
“Under three hundred.”
Oh, Patricia. I had had Patricia Hod, who might have been crazy but who was a marvelous woman otherwise, and now I had … what? I had trouble, I had waste, I had misery a-comin’ and I did not look forward to it. I lay there like Cleopatra on my divan, waiting for a date on this little tannin-colored Nile. I got ravenous. Three hundred pounds would not be enough. This entire place and setting and setup was so squalid it began to blossom with bright, false possibility: we were flowers, us humans, of infinite variety and stripe and hope, each of us perfumed with our unique potential.
Then I saw two women tromping down the shore, both in white, both nurses indubitably, and the one following the first was indeed as broad and squat as the little Philco refrigerator.
Taurus was over and behind me, looking. “You can call her Sweetie or Catfish,” he said. Just as they came up the stairs he added, “Be careful.”
“Why?”
“She’s the daughter.”
In the brief time we all spent together that followed, I saw that what he meant was he had to be careful. The mother, whom he called Mrs. Ames, watched the daughter with a kind of indifferent scrutiny that suggested at once a father watching a son, hoping he’d get laid, and a mother watching a daughter to see that she did not. By “Be careful” Taurus had instructed me to slip between the zones of this paternal-maternal coverage. I had to be interested in Sweetie but not aggressive; I had to let her come on to me when she did, and prompt her to when she did not. This was difficult with a large, strange woman you did not want.