“I’m going to give you a little extra time,” he said, “let you get in a little trouble with your memory. — See ya.”
As he darted off, I sensed the air pouring into the tops of his shoes, his purely professional curiosity, the shifting part of his hair, and the utter menace of being up against someone who had a real memory he’d use on you.
* * *
It wasn’t long before I began having a problem retrieving funds from the depraved pervert wishing well. As you know, I have been beset by impostors. Years ago numerous elephants lost their lives in Western Europe at the hands of people who had no idea what a batting practice machine was. An enterprising Frenchman emerged in Brazilian soccer clothes; but that wasn’t the point. That odd young fellow, Chris Burden, who shoots himself, was closer to me and my elephant than these deluded Europeans. The main thing is that impostors have been my cross. The worst of them was at the well today.
I emerged from my home by the sea in shorts and drugstore flipflops. I was not anxious to run into anyone, as I had been making notes to myself that morning on my stomach with a ballpoint while I drank my coffee and greeted the new day. I hadn’t had a chance for a shower; and I knew that from a stranger’s point of view, I did look a bit like something from the National Geographic. At any rate, there was a stranger at the well. In human history, one of the most terrifying appearances is that of the stranger at the well. The truth is, if I had still been in the same business of my recent years, I would have included this in my repertoire. He peered at the upside-down map of the Lesser Antilles on my stomach, the word “Antigua” scrawled across my belly button. I really shouldn’t have come out.
He was dressed in clean white ducks stylishly unpressed. A chambray shirt and a handsome old blazer. He wore deck shoes on brown sockless ankles. He was a well-groomed man in his fifties and he carried a small, heavy satchel that said “Racquetball” on its side. When I appeared, he reached inside and began throwing handfuls of silver dollars into the well.
“Now will you talk to me?” he said. “I am your father.”
“This is a cruel ploy to take with an orphan,” I told him. I wondered if he would ever find his son. He kept showering the silver dollars into the well, as if to say I would not talk to him otherwise. The pathos of this empty gesture is absolutely all that kept me there.
“You touch me with your desperation,” I said. “And I advise you to roll up your pants and get your money back. You’ve got the wrong Joe.” With this he angrily emptied the whole satchel into the water. I would never touch that haunted money.
“Now listen you sonofabitch. I haven’t got all day. I’m going to find out if you’re compos mentis before I go back to Ohio or know the reason why. I’m trying to have a well-earned rest on my yacht, which I have maintained at the dock for five years unused in anticipation of this holiday, and I’m pissing the entire deal away running down my birdbrain, notorious son who refuses to admit I exist.”
It was quiet for a long time.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s all I want!” he said, and his voice caught. He turned away. He hurled the racquetball bag into the well and walked off to a waiting car.
So, you see?
8
I DECIDED that if I was to break out of my present pattern of impoverishment, sorrows, and anger, and stop waiting for everything with Catherine to repair itself, then I would have to fly in the face of my instincts and perhaps discipline myself and do things I didn’t want to do and make friends with Peavey even though he was robbing my stepmother of what was rightfully hers and ensconcing himself in her Florida room with his associates and his bimbo secretary. This was not going to be easy. This was going to be a bitch. But if I succeeded, I might begin to make sense to other people too.
I got there rather early in the morning. Mary, the housekeeper, was sitting on the front stoop, drunk. I said good morning and she attempted a reply but could only make a bubble, though it was a good-sized one. I stepped past her and went into the house. I saw Peavey immediately. He looked up at me without acknowledgment, crossed to the Florida room, and closed the door behind him. He was dressed rather simply: a grimy pair of Fruit of the Loom underdrawers. When he opened the door, I caught a glimpse of his secretary rolled up in a sleeping bag and idly returning the empties to a six-pack carton.
Roxy was in the living room, legs crossed at her writing desk, looking smart in an off-pink Chanel suit. This set piece of normalcy was not going to take me in.
“Sit down, Chet, I’ll be with you in a moment.”
“Take your time.”
“Bills, obligations, God.”
“What’s Counselor Peavey doing running around in his underwear?”
“Just got up. What’s seven times nine?”
“Sixty-three. Was that his secretary in the sleeping bag?”
“Sometimes she’s a secretary. She’s kind of a late riser. Works late. If that little gal gets wind of the Equal Rights Amendment, Peavey’ll have his hands full. — I thought so! The aqueduct commission has robbed me to the tune of two dollars and nineteen cents. Did you see Ruiz when you came in?”
“No.”
“Well, he’s selling my grapefruits. I’m going to skin that chiseler.”
We could hear Peavey making not-quite-human noises through the door to the Florida room.
“What’s he charging?” Roxy asked.
“Who?”
“Ruiz. For the grapefruits.”
“God, Roxy, I’ve never seen him selling your grapefruits.”
Mary walked through the room with a thin row of bubbles on her lips.
“What’s the matter with her?” I asked.
“Get that fly,” shouted Roxy.
“Roxy, what fly?”
“What fly? The fly walking through my addition practically into your face.”
“I want to give you away.”
“I think your father should do that.”
“But I’m having a party at the Casa Marina,” I said.
“Who’s the orchestra?”
“Jorge Cruz.”
“That’s very nice. Jorge is very good indeed. Plays some attractive sambas—” Roxy got to her feet and began to samba. I could see her starting to get peculiar and I returned her to her chair.
“Don’t start shoving me around,” she snarled. “Not with my obligations you don’t.”
“I just wanted you to sit and talk to me for a moment.”
“I’ve got a thieving gardener, a stack of bills like that, and a drunken attorney with an outside line consorting in my Florida room with some women’s libber in a sleeping bag.”
“Well, why are you marrying him!”
Peavey peeked out of the door.
“Who asked for your two cents?” he demanded.
“I just I…”
“Nixon.”
He withdrew.
* * *
The usual pattern of mayhem in the morning paper was altered in the edition of The Key West Citizen I bought to forget the situation at Roxy’s (where I had got no reply to my offer to give away my stepmother, in matrimony). A young couple living on Big Coppitt, having fun with morphine and Quaaludes, beat up their three-year-old son and threw him through the window; the little boy took seventeen hours to die. Page 2: “Hints for Shell Collectors.”
I walked to my place with tinned dog food, stepped into the patio, and said, “Deirdre” to my dog. I had named her, after seven years. I held out my arms and she leapt about, running on her hind legs. “Deirdre,” I said, “Deirdre, Deirdre, Deirdre.” And for a moment, page one’s hint that the human race was in line for a fiery death, vanished.