For months they did not hear from Newt, only two cards from Ivy thanking them for boat, motor, luggage and Newt. This sounded good. Around Christmas they got a letter from Newt. He was in the state asylum in Tuscaloosa, drying out and “regaining health and reason.” The marriage was all over. He was smashed with contrition. There’d been too many things he’d done to Ivy, unforgivable, though she’d wanted to hang in right till the last. What last nastiness he had done was, after her badgering, he’d written her a poem of such devastating spite there was no recovery. It was a “sinful, horrible thing.” Now he still loved her. She’d been a jewel. He was a pig, but at least looking up and out now. He pleaded with them not to visit him. Later, out, when he was better. He still had health insurance from the school and needed nothing.
. . And Dad, the boat and motor was wonderful. Bimmer stole it, though. He proved to be no real friend at all. I ran after him down the highway outside the city limits with a tire tool in my hand. They say I was raving, my true friends, and they brought me up here. True. I was raving. No more “they said.” Please forgive me. I’m already much better.
Love, Newton
Nabby and he held hands for an hour. Nabby began praying aloud for Newt and then blamed the “foreigners at Auburn and all that dreadful radioactivity from the science department.” Ross was incredulous. Nabby was going nuts in sympathy. Have a good day, Ross, have a good day. He walked out to the pier, into his writing room, and trembled. For no reason he cursed the Bay of Mobile, even the happy crabs out there. What could a man take?
Then, next week, another blow lowered him. Chase’s wife called and told him Chase was dead. He’d taken a pistol over to Long Beach, threatened his ex-wife, and was killed in a shoot-out with the police. God have mercy. Chase was a policeman himself.
Ross recalled the street, the long steep hill down to Paseo del Mar from Chase’s house, with thick adobe walls around it. Ross had needed the walls. He was badly messed up and stayed that way a month, having fired himself from the war, G-22, all that, after he misdirected the Seals to a hot beach and got them mortared. Chase met him in a bar and they stayed soaked for five weeks. Chase was a one-liner maniac. All of life had a filthy pun or stinger. Ross thought it was all for him and appreciated it. But when he got better and wouldn’t drink anymore, Chase kept it up. Ross needn’t have been there at all, really, he found out. Chase became angry when Ross quit laughing. Not only were the jokes not funny anymore, Ross knew he was witnessing a dire malady. Chase kept hitting the beer and telling Ross repeatedly about his ex-wife, whom he loved still even though married to Bernice, a quiet thin Englishwoman, almost not there at all but very strong for Chase, it seemed to Everett D. Ross, before he was E. Dan Ross. Ross heard of vague trouble with the woman in Long Beach and the law. But Chase was selfless and mainly responsible for Ross’s recovery, giving him all he needed and more. Chase had also adopted a poor street kid, a friend of his daughter’s. He was like that. He would opt for stress and then holler in fits about it. When Ross told him he was leaving, taking his rearranged name with him back to Mobile where his wife waited, hoping for his well-being, Chase went into a rage and attacked him for ingratitude, malingering, and — what was it? — “betrayal.” Not of the Seals. Of Chase. It was never clear and Chase apologized, back into the rapid-fire one-liners. Chase was very strange, but Ross had not thought he was deranged. The shoot-out sounded like, certainly, suicide, near the mother of his children. Too, too much. A man Ross’s age, calling happily to the ships at sea around LA Harbor over his ham set. Raving puns and punchers.
The very next day he heard that a classmate of his, the class joker, had shot himself dead in a bathtub in San Francisco. Wanted to make no mess. Something about money and his father’s turning his back on him. Ross could not work. He stayed in his pier room rolling up paper from his new biography — of an old sort of holy cowboy in San Antonio. Talked to animals, birds, such as that. Four wives, twelve children. The balls of paper lay in a string like popcorn on the meager tide, going around the ocean to California where the dead friends were. Ross thought of the men not only as dead but as dead fathers. Children: smaller them, offspring of grown pranksters, gag addicts. Ross thought of his air rifle. His classmate, last Ross had seen of him, right before he went over to Vietnam, was in the National Guard. He did something hazy for athletic teams around Chicago, where Ross last saw him. It didn’t take much time. His real life work was theft and happy cynicism about others. Bridge could level anybody with mordant wit. He’d kept Ross and others howling through their passionate high school years. Once, on a lake beach in late April, a class party where some of the girls were in their bathing suits sunning themselves, first time out this spring, Bridge had passed a couple of lookers and stopped, appreciative, right in front of them: “Very, very nice. Up to morgue white, those tans.” The boys howled, the girls frowned, mortified. Given everything by his psychiatrist parents, Bridge still stole, regularly. Ross heard he’d been kicked out of the university for stealing a football player’s watch from a locker. Bridge was an equipment man. He deeply relished equipment, and ran at the edge of athletic teams, the aristocracy in Southern schools. In Chicago, he’d taken Ross up to his attic. Here was a pretty scary thing: Bridge had stolen from his unit a Browning.30-caliber machine gun and live ammo and enough gear to dress a store dummy, stolen somewhere else; he had set the dummy behind the machine gun among a number of sandbags (the labor!) so that the machine gun aimed right at the arriving visitor. Ross jumped back when the light was turned on. Bridge, Bridge. Used to wear three pairs of socks to make his legs look bigger. Used Man Tan so he was brown in midwinter. Children, money and booze. Maybe great unrepayable debt at the end.
Ross knew he was of the age to begin losing friends to death. But more profound was the fact that he was not the first to go. Fools, some thirty of them from his big high school in Mobile, had gone over to Asia and none of them was seriously scratched or demented on return. It was a merry and lusty school, mental health or illness practically unheard of. What was his month of breakdown? Nothing. What was he doing, balling up the hard work and watching it float off? Nothing.
His son in a nut ward, Nabby collapsing, he took down a straight large glass of tequila and peered strongly across the bay to where Ivy Pilgrim had grown up. Did she have to be all disappeared from Newt, forever? A smart young woman, very sexy, plenty tough, endowed, couldn’t cure him. He missed her. Ross, frankly, was glad Newton didn’t want him at the asylum. But he sat down and wrote him a long letter, encouraging his strengths. The tequila gave him some peace. He took another half glass. His friend, Andy the pelican, walked into the room and Ross began talking to him, wanting to know his adventures before he opened a can of tuna for him.
He confessed his grief and confusion to the pelican. The absurd creature, flying bag, talked back to him: “Tell me. It’s rough all over, pard. Lost my whole family in Hurricane Fred.” One thing about the sea, thought Ross, sneering toward it, it doesn’t care. Almost beautiful in that act. Maybe we should all try it.
Next thing they heard, Newt was visiting his sister in Orlando. She and her husband lent their condo at New Smyrna Beach to him. He was sunning and “refining his health” at pool and ocean-side. He was working on poems and didn’t know how he felt about them. Walker, Ann’s husband, came by frequently and chatted. He liked Walker a lot. He wasn’t going to impose on them forever. The world was “over there” and he knew it. Ross and Nabby’s music was helping, thanks. Especially Bach. Had they ever listened to the Tabernacle Choir? Glorious. Newt said that he wanted “excruciatingly to walk in the Way.” Grats extreme too for the money. He was just beginning his life and would be reimbursing everybody soon. “Truly, though, people, I like being poor and I am going to get used to it.”