* * *
I don’t think Peavey was glad to see me hunker next to him on the red stool. The fanaticism with which he slurped down the bargain quantities of ropa vieja, black beans, and yellow rice suggested a speedy exit.
I said, “Hello, Curtis.”
“How long are you back for—”
“Got a bit of it on your chin there, didn’t you.”
“Here, yes, pass me one of those.”
“How’s Roxy holding up?” I asked.
“She’s more than holding up. A regular iron woman.”
“A regular what?”
“Iron woman.”
“You want another napkin?”
“Get out of here you depraved pervert.”
I said, “You’ll never get her money.”
“I’d teach you a lesson,” said Curtis Peavey, rising to his feet and deftly thumbing acrylic pleats from his belt line, “but you’re carrying a gun, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, “to perforate your duodenum.”
“You have threatened me,” he said softly. “Did you hear that, shit-for-brains? It won’t do.” Peavey strolled into the heat and wind. I stopped at the cash register and paid for his slop.
I went for a walk.
Something started the night I rode the six-hundred-pound Yorkshire hog into the Oakland auditorium; I was double-billed with four screaming soul monsters and I shut everything down as though I’d burned the building. I had dressed myself in Revolutionary War throwaways and a top hat, much like an Iroquois going to Washington to ask the Great White Father to stop sautéing his babies. When they came over the lights, I pulled a dagger they knew I’d use. I had still not replaced my upper front teeth and I helplessly drooled. I was a hundred and eighty-five pounds of strangely articulate shrieking misfit and I would go too god damn far.
At the foot of Seminary I stopped to look at a Czech marine diesel being lowered into a homemade trap boat on a chain fall. It was stolen from Cuban nationals, who get nice engines from the Reds. The police four-wheel drifted around the corner aiming riot guns my way. Getting decency these days is like pulling teeth. Once the car was under control and stopped, two familiar officers, Nylon Pinder and Platt, put me up against the work shed for search.
“Drive much?” I asked.
“Alla damn time,” said Platt.
“Why work for Peavey?” I asked.
Platt said, “He’s a pillar of our society. When are you gonna learn the ropes?”
Nylon Pinder said, “He don’t have the gun on him.”
Platt wanted to know, “What you want with the.38 Smith?”
“It’s for Peavey’s brain pan. I want him to see the light. He’s a bad man.”
“Never register a gun you mean to use. Get a cold piece. Peavey’s a pillar of our society.”
“Platt said that.”
“Shut up, you. He’s a pillar of our society and you’re a depraved pervert.”
“Peavey said that.”
“Nylon said for you to shut your hole, misfit.”
“I said that, I said ‘misfit.’”
Platt did something sudden to my face. There was blood. I pulled out my bridge so if I got trounced I wouldn’t swallow it. Platt said, “Look at that, will you.”
I worked my way around the Czech diesel. They were going to leave me alone now. “Platt,” I said, “when you off?”
“Saturdays. You can find me at Rest Beach.”
“Depraved pervert,” said Nylon, moving only his lips in that vast face. “Get some teeth,” he said. “You look like an asshole.”
The two of them sauntered away. I toyed with the notion of filling their mouths with a couple of handfuls of bees, splitting their noses, pushing small live barracudas up their asses. The mechanic on the chain fall said, “What did they want with you? Your nose is bleeding.”
“I’m notorious,” I said. “I’m cheating society and many of my teeth are gone. Five minutes ago I was young. You saw me! What is this? I’ve given my all and this is the thanks I get. If Jesse James had been here, he wouldn’t have let them do that.”
The mechanic stared at me and said, “Right.”
I hiked to my stepmother’s, to Roxy’s. I stood like a druid in her doorway and refused to enter. “You and your Peavey,” I said. “I can’t touch my face.”
“Throbs?”
“You and your god damn Peavey.”
“He won’t see me any more. He says you’ve made it impossible. I ought to kill you. But your father will be here soon and he’ll straighten you out.”
“Peavey buckled, did he? I don’t believe that. He’ll be back. — And my father is dead.”
“Won’t see me any more. Peavey meant something and now he’s gone. He called me his tulip.”
“His…?”
“You heard me.”
I gazed at Roxy. She looked like a circus performer who had been shot from the cannon one too many times.
In family arguments, things are said which are so heated and so immediate as to seem injuries which could never last; but which in fact are never forgotten. Now nothing is left of my family except two uncles and this tattered stepmother who technically died; nevertheless, I can trace myself through her to those ghosts, those soaring, idiot forebears with their accusations, and their steady signal that, whatever I thought I was, I was not the real thing. We had all said terrible things to each other, added insult to injury. My father had very carefully taken me apart and thrown the pieces away. And now his representatives expected me to acknowledge his continued existence.
So, you might ask, why have anything to do with Roxy? I don’t know. It could be that after the anonymity of my fields of glory, coming back had to be something better than a lot of numinous locations, the house, the convent school, Catherine. Maybe not Catherine. Apart from my own compulsions, which have applied to as little as the open road, I don’t know what she has to do with the price of beans … I thought I’d try it anyway. Catherine. Roxy looked inside me.
“Well, you be a good boy and butt out. Somehow, occupy yourself. We can’t endlessly excuse you because you’re recuperating. I died and got less attention. Then, I was never an overnight sensation.”
I went home and fed the dog, this loving speckled friend who after seven trying years in my life has never been named. The dog. She eats very little and stares at the waves. She kills a lizard; then, overcome with remorse, tips over in the palm shadows for a troubled snooze.
* * *
Catherine stuck it out for a while. She stayed with me at the Sherry-Netherland and was in the audience when I crawled out of the ass of a frozen elephant and fought a duel in my underwear with a baseball batting practice machine. She looked after my wounds. She didn’t quit until late. There was no third party in question.
* * *
I could throw a portion of my body under a passing automobile in front of Catherine’s house. A rescue would be necessary. Catherine running toward me resting on my elbows, my crushed legs on the pavement between us. All is forgiven. I’ll be okay. I’ll learn to remember. We’ll be happy together.
* * *
I had a small sharpie sailboat which I built with my own hands in an earlier life and which I kept behind the A&B Lobster House next to the old cable schooner. I did a handsome job on this boat if I do say so; and she has survived both my intermediate career and neglect. I put her together like a fiddle, with longleaf pine and white-oak frames, fastened with bronze. She has a rabbeted chine and I let the centerboard trunk directly into the keel, which was tapered at both ends. Cutting those changing bevels in hard pine and oak took enormous concentration and drugs; not the least problem was in knowing ahead of time that it would be handy to have something I had made still floating when my life fell apart years later.