I pulled over. You could see the stars in the water and the tide gathered against the pilings. I carried the sandwiches and Catherine closed her hands in front of her, as if something was happening. I dropped a pebble from the rail and it plunked like in a well, though it was sea water passing between islands.
“Going where?” Catherine asked.
“What?”
“The sea water.”
“Was I talking out loud?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know, from the Gulf to the Atlantic. From Gulf Shores to Atlantic View. From Gulf Rest to Atlantic-Aire.” This was me, side-slipping. Catherine busted me.
“Why do you need to add those things? Whatever poetry is in you, you hate like everything.”
“That’s where the sea water was going.”
“No it wasn’t.”
We walked to the middle of the bridge and found what little moving air there was. When I looked down at the water, it was the darkest part of the night. It showed silver against the abutments or you couldn’t have seen it; it could have been the drop-off, the edge of the world.
“You know he’s back.”
“Who?”
“You must talk to him. You must settle that with yourself.”
“He’s dead.”
“Do you believe that? You talked to him on the phone.”
Oh, God, Oh ghosts, all on threads in the dark, not to be spoken to. Catherine, don’t make me see this. There are stains, seeps, things you do not see. I had to look into the night; and sure enough, I was provided a skimmer bird, opening a brilliant seam in the water.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
“Yes, lovely.”
“Hungry?”
“Sorry.”
The old man in the white shirt was upon us before we heard him coming; we couldn’t speak until he had passed on. Catherine stared at him again. I was afraid.
“You can’t make everything up,” Catherine said gently.
“Like what?”
“You can’t make up that they’re dead. And the others,” she said, “they’ll all turn up too.”
“There’s only one I want to see.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Jesse James.”
* * *
An outboard went under the bridge on a long white V and disappeared. Beyond the channel a light moved on the highway. The wake slapped under the bridge. Catherine peered at me and said, “I wonder who that old man was?”
“No way of knowing.”
“He seemed to stare at everything. He was staring at me. He knew everything and he was staring.”
She climbed up on the railing, teetering over the water, and I knew she was loaded from the piña coladas. I ate a crab-salad sandwich.
“You’re going to fall off that and drown,” I said.
“So what.”
“Then where will you be?”
Catherine jumped. At first I saw her in the air, then she was gone in the blackness, and then she lit up in her silver splash and disappeared.
I ran across the bridge to the shore. I couldn’t see anything and I broke my way along the mangroves down tide from the bridge and listened. The light through the leaves was like candle flames. I couldn’t see anything but I could hear voices. I was all caught up inside my chest and I felt everything sweeping toward something where there was no light.
I kept going, watching the water, toward the voices. The mangroves stood up black on their roots, hermit crabs clinging underneath and rattling to the ground as I pushed through. Then there was a muddy indentation of the shore where the tide whispered past.
Catherine was lying there and the old man in the white shirt was arranging her hair like a sunburst in the mud. When he saw me, he stood up and moved away until his shirt smeared the dark. I bent over Catherine, her face pale between the black arrows of hair.
She said, “Are we alive?”
9
I DROPPED CATHERINE at her home. She never spoke again that night. Then I drove across the island to my place. There was something going on inside. I walked around very carefully, listening to mayhem in my house. I opened the door through the wall cautiously.
Inside, my dog cowered by the stack of plant pots, one eye swollen shut from a blow; and just beyond, Nylon Pinder was tipping over the furniture and flinging drawers across the room, kicking the bottoms out from under standing lamps and tearing up anything that would tear.
He turned when I came in and moved wide as his smile toward me and sent my teeth spinning through lamplight. It seemed an obvious extension of my beef with Peavey. But I asked him why he had hit the dog. This only reminded him and the grin became one of discovery. He headed for the dog and I headed for a tipped-over lamp. I picked up a piece of milk glass about the time he got to the dog and hit him in the side of the face with it.
He turned in astonishment and what there was was very much like the earlier smile; but it went back to his ear on one side and you could see teeth all the way.
“Run,” I said. “You’re bleeding to death.”
* * *
The morning Citizen said that Nylon Pinder had taken a tumble and was in satisfactory condition in Memorial Hospital. Next, I would have to begin on Peavey before he began on me.
I was feeling somber. I was the subject of assaults and menaces, told that the dead were alive; and I was in love with a woman who didn’t seem to care for anything except an evasion of the light that I understood but knew, as she did not know, to be poison. One false move and we’d all go under together.
I walked down to Duval Street and spent a quarter on a machine that analyzed my handwriting. I learned that I was given to emotional crescendos. I must have made some audible response because the proprietor of the arcade, a man so bald and so bearded as to suggest that his hair was on upside down, came up to me and glanced at my analysis card and asked me what I did. I told him I was a regimental musician at Vera Cruz. He asked what I was doing in Key West and I told him that my patent attorney, my allergy specialist, and the vicissitudes of my root canals urged a move.
There was a door at the back of the arcade that said “Adult Material.” I passed through and played a dirty-movie machine with a fifty-cent piece. A fat girl came on the screen, undressed, and hit the deck. She retracted her legs as a naked man trotted toward her. Her bum was like a turret. The gentleman penetrated this valved protrusion with martial address until the fifty cents ran out. I sighed.
I said to the proprietor, “This is a perfect town for a quiet killing.” There was no emotional crescendo in sight.
“I’ve got a few choice words for people like you,” he said and I passed into the street with a peaceful smile. I walked to the Southernmost Point. A very old man and a very old woman were arguing.
She said, “I never saw so many oddballs. I want to get us out from under all these filthy people.”
“I don’t care about this,” he said. “Did Robert fix the wind-up on the mower like I told him?”
“He best had!” she said with just as much vituperation as she’d displayed against the oddballs.
What I was doing was thinking and slowly circling back to Roxy’s. I was nervous. I knew Peavey would be there. I didn’t know whether to bring up Nylon Pinder; but I decided against it when I thought how cute Peavey was and how little chance there would be of his admitting such a connection.
Peavey behaved cordially. He was with Roxy among the grapefruits, trying to knock down a loner high in the tree with a bamboo pole. I was very slightly moved because the grapefruits were all Roxy owned up to caring about. Seeing Peavey try to get one down for her reconciled me to him a little.
Roxy said, “That Ruiz. I’m going to get a colored man, I swear I am.”