We all had some beer together, during which time Mrs. Ames talked about work, its headaches, and Sweetie confirmed her sentiments. Mrs. Ames suggested that Sweetie and I go down to the water. There I screwed my courage into one sweet ball and kissed her, as her silent, vaguely impatient, moon-gazing planting of herself on a small dock suggested she wanted, or expected. She had bumpy skin, some kind of unexpressed acne, not unlike the shaving bumps on black guys. She was inert, but still seemed impatient, so I touched one of her breasts, which could not have fit into a bucket. She remained inert, or impatient, I was distracted by her size at this point, and I pressed and lifted the breast up, which required subtly getting under it with a little shoulder. At this she pushed me back and said, with great practiced authority one might use on a horse, “Hold on, Junior.”
“What?”
“I said Hold on, Junior.”
“No problem.” I held her lamely a minute more about the waist and then politely disengaged — sensing she expected me to continue my assault — and had no more to do with her. I looked at the stars and she looked at the water and I hoped Taurus knew he had about three minutes to effect his exchange with Mrs. Ames, mother of Catfish, before I left Catfish on the bayou and got on that divan thing and went to sleep.
I woke up cold, with the feeling the house was resettling itself, as if Mrs. Ames and Catfish had just tromped out of it, adjusting their purses on their shoulders, and were to be seen in parade going back up the foggy bayou whence they’d come, and I was about to look when Taurus, sitting at a table in the center of the room, said, “Your mother wanted you to be great. But she really wanted to be great herself.”
“I know that.”
“Women do this. Men don’t give a damn.”
“What stopped her?”
“From being great?”
“Yeah.”
“You.”
“Right.”
“In her heart, she thinks that, probably. Not bitterly and not often.”
“I believe you.”
This conversation did not strike me as odd at the time. I did not ponder how he knew or presumed to know these things, or why he was uncharacteristically, according to my memory of him, spouting like this. It all seemed rather natural, if not necessary, in the Hiroshima wake of the Ames sex bombing and I guess in the entire business of my presuming and managing to find him. Who was he for me to find, who was I to find him, who was my mother to be his lover? In all the not knowing, it seemed a little speculation was called for, not simply excusable.
“She has the passion to believe that,” he said, “and to believe in something like being great, whatever it means. Men don’t give a shit, more and more. If they ever did.”
“What do you mean?”
“In olden days when there was … opportunity, you could be Caesar. Now …”
“Now we are at best amateurs at seizing opportunity. These are my very words.”
“What?”
“Nothing. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“She thought you were great, I take it. You seized something. Albeit my own mother—”
“She mistook me for you, for a minute, and for your old man, for a minute longer, and then saw I was neither and let me go. She saw I was nothing.”
“What are you?”
“I’ll tell you what I should have been. I should have been a wild-haired Hungarian that made the atomic bomb or one rough buck nigger. I’m a game warden. I don’t hunt. I hunt men who hunt. I hunt them inexactly.”
“Guy came by got that nutria.”
“I see.”
“He supposed to?”
“He supposed to.”
This moment evoked completely and perfectly what I remembered of my earlier time with this man. He left, into his little room.
21
IN THE MORNING WE had some meat I was convinced was breakfast nutria and got two umbrellas that had Notre Dame printed on them and motored away in the pirogue. I was utterly turned around, if I’d ever been oriented. It was raining, hard, yet with promise of doing it all day, and you soon wondered what sense it made being in a boat as opposed to just wading or swimming. We went through miles of stumped swamp and duckweed and tortured stands of tupelo gums with their skirts up, showing their roots. I saw no animals. Then I saw what looked like a Mexican in a small clearing. He had a pirogue — as regular as a Chevrolet out here — and watched us, casually, pass.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Indian.”
“Indian?”
“This is a reservation.”
“A reservation?”
“Yes.”
We went on. And on and on. We got into something that looked untagged, finally, much thicker, and it filtered out much of the rain, which produced a lightness of sorts in the new denser woods — it felt suddenly rather cheery, like springtime. I thought of Johnny Weissmuller swinging through transplanted monkeys. I thought of white women. I thought of many things inexplicable in their timing when the truly inexplicable arose before me: a castle, or something. My second impression was a hospital, my third was that it was a mansion for the so impossibly rich (a Vanderbilt house, say) that they’d abjured location, location, location. I could not picture the substructure necessary to hold it up in this swamp.
It — the building — looked to be about five hundred feet across its brown stone face and to have been built by Mussolini. This was the kind of thing you’d be taken to in South Carolina and it would have a hallowed, understated name like Brick House and would have been owned by a haunted family like Seabrook, but now Ted Turner would own it and there’d be actresses, Jane or no, naked on the roof beside the (new) pool. But it wouldn’t be the size of a hospital. It would be human-scaled, if large — entertainable, that is — and therefore all the more prepossessing. This monstrosity was industrial. It was unlit. I supposed it, somehow, connected to “Indians,” whatever that meant.
In anticipating Indians, I was close. The thing was full of what you’d call hippies, for want of a better term. There was every stripe of lost person under fifty, and some older, in the joint, and a couple of Charlie Manson leaders and a couple of Dennis Hopper loons and a couple of Mama Cass sandwich eaters, and in one room I believe I saw a ring of praying pygmies.
“We are looking for game violations and we won’t find any,” Taurus told me. “I wanted you to see this.” We went all through the house, which I’d estimate at a hundred rooms. It was three stories and had big hallways as if it had been intended for industrial use of some kind. In the basement there was a swimming pool with water in it the color and consistency of sugarcane juice and two small alligators in that green porridge.
“There’s your game violation,” I said.
“No, that’s not a game violation. They can’t keep them out. Let’s go smoke a peace pipe.”
We went upstairs and met with a redheaded guy who seemed equivalent to a Secretary of State. I had the immediate feeling he represented in his hale, bluff cheer some darker and more ornery political figure — one of the Mansons skittering around, perhaps. This guy was coming on like a Kiwanis man. He got us some beer from a chest freezer in a hall, the only appliance I saw in the place, and I don’t know what powered it, if anything — the beer was hot. Women passed us in tie-dyed outfits, looking bucolically purposeful — they’d just meet your eye before looking away, slowly, at the baseboards, as they walked, hips swaying, on. A newsletter of sorts was on the chest freezer, which was serving as a bar. It had a headline that read US: 111, AMERIKA: O.