I looked out at the ocean, past the ruined pier where nothing was visible except Don smoking in the shadows. I called out, “Aren’t you hot in that suit?” and opened a can of dog food. Weird guy, Don; he smokes Virginia Slims and carries his car and office keys hanging on a split ring from the belt loop of his gleaming suit. I have to study him as a means of keeping him at arm’s length. A less patient man than me would pull all his teeth or something. When I looked out again, Don was gone, but his cigarette smoke was still in the air, quite visible against the quiet blue sea.
Beyond the wall, I could hear sunbathers talking and I eavesdropped on their senseless conversations. Deirdre stood beside me.
“Scarred for life…”
“Not excited…”
“… nothing personal between us.”
“Girl is getting me down. (I spoke to her of) … Rasputin, the Kalahari, the telegraphy of souls and ocean. All she wants to do is sixty-nine.”
* * *
Then I went straight back to Roxy’s, blood in my eye. I went to the outside window on the west side of the house, stood among the raped grapefruit trees, adjusting the garden hose. Peavey was dictating a memo to the bimbo and I let that shitsucker have it, squirting everything and shorting out the typewriter. Peavey said I wouldn’t be able to say I didn’t ask for it. His hair spread in vertical lines behind his glasses. There were puddles.
* * *
The morning mail made a terrific difference. Paramount had released Chronicles of a Depraved Pervert, which was good for a deferment of just about a half a million dollars. I wrote out a deposit, knowing I’d cover the check before it went through. Oh, boy. I went back to the same teller, endorsed and presented the check. “Call me when this clears.”
“I shall.”
“Break your balls?”
“It’s only money.”
When I got to the house again, the phone was ringing. I answered it and had a long, tormenting conversation with someone close to me, which confused me very much as it was someone I had long believed to be dead. My own unstoried dead are an important phase of my current balance and having them pop up like this produces unusual stress and an urge for mayhem. The living are skeletons in livery anyway. I’m not going for this. My first impulse was to wonder if they ever found Jesse James’s body.
* * *
I bought a Land-Rover, and an attractive home for Catherine. She refused to look at the house on her own. I didn’t feel I had the time; I had bought the place by phone and didn’t want to be disappointed. She was tending to Marcelline again; Marcelline’s fiancé—I didn’t know she’d had one — was arrested in New Orleans for grave robbery. I thought this was a ghastly crime but Marcelline assured Catherine that many young musicians in that city survive by robbing the Creole cemeteries.
“I thought she hated the Cornstalks Hotel because it was full of musicians.”
“One was right for her.”
“One was right for her? What does he play?”
“What?”
“What instrument?”
“Moog.”
This left me with an undeservedly bad impression of Catherine; and I called again and asked her if she would go up the keys with me in my new Land-Rover. We could go to No Name and see all the way to Little Knock Em Down. This touched her craving for actuality and she said, “Yes, oh yes.”
I made crab-salad sandwiches and iced two quarts of piña coladas. I got a blanket and some bug repellent. I loaded everything into the Land-Rover and glanced across the street. For just an instant I thought I spotted Jesse James on the broken sidewalk.
* * *
I had some trouble with the Land-Rover in the beginning. While not a Road Ace, I am a good driver with illegal left-hand turns as my only moving violations. But the Land-Rover had a number of shift levers, high range, low range, transfer case; and when I looked in the manual, I found only the instructions for attaching sheep shears to the power takeoff. None of the gears were synchronized, and by the time I got to Catherine’s, I had crashed the gearbox good. I slurped insistently on the piña coladas and peered about behind the divided windshield, idling with the controls.
Catherine climbed up and in, Marcelline waving from a curtain. All along the street, people had piled their dead palm leaves for pickup and the Spanish limes were dropping steadily on the tin roofs. We were on a gloomy side street with traffic flickering at either end and the sky high and oceanic.
I said, “It takes a rhino to turn one of these over.”
“What is this?”
“A Buick.”
“They’re supposed to be good.”
“Why won’t you look at your new house?”
“What’s the meaning of this house?”
“This is a little present, this house.”
“In honor of what?”
“Panama.”
“Oh, God, Panama. I found your suitcase from the wedding trip. We never unpacked it.”
“What was in it?”
“Ammo.”
“What?”
“Ammo.”
“Anything else?”
“Burke’s Peerage. Linen. A beer.”
We crossed Stock Island and on Big Coppitt I studied the slow, wind-moving electric lights on a one-man used-car lot. The hospital sat to our left in the marl and mangroves. We were drinking fast to avoid the queer noise of eternity in the air.
The Land-Rover was all wound up at fifty. It bumped over channels on hidden bridges and at Boca Chica warplanes lifted into the distance. Then we had some good old-time darkness unrelinquished to the age. Through the window, warm, wet Florida smells and the unyielding kiss of tires on moist pavement.
“What else did we leave in Panama.”
“Don’t ask me.”
“Catherine.”
“Well, don’t.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“We left everything.”
“I don’t believe that. Come on.”
“We left it all.”
At lower Sugarloaf, I pulled over. I got out and shone my flashlight in the tidal slough. It was still; the stars and planets shone on the surface.
“Used to be crabs here.”
“What kind of crabs?”
“Blue crabs.”
“Is that eating crabs?”
“The best. Sometimes they were soft-shelled. They looked the same as hard-shelled but I couldn’t be sure enough to pick them up. I knew I’d get the misfit who’d kept his shell and he’d do a number on my hand.”
Danny and the Juniors were on the radio, quiet and remote. The pavement stretched in front of the windshield. I turned to Miami Cuban radio and listened to Celia Cruz and watched the incursions of water glint along the road.
“Is the nation at war?” I asked.
“Not for some time. Don’t you watch Walter Cronkite?”
“I don’t go to the movies.”
“Well, there’s no war. There’s an election.”
“How’re they doing?”
“Fine.”
That made me feel good. I felt good all the way to the Chat-and-Chew on Summerland; and by Big Pine, it was time to turn out toward No Name. It became darker and the pines were tall and reaching and didn’t look like they feared falling in the ocean or getting blown over. They were pines that dared to suggest that islands are misery where brave horsemen run off the earth and topple into the unknown.
There was darkness but there was still shade and we flashed by an old man in a white shirt standing by the road watching the stark, queer trees. Then the sky bent into the road and we were at the No Name Bridge. Catherine looked at the old man and then at me. Was it Jesse? I couldn’t very well ask her.