So now I sit staring at the long black cigars and at the bottle of French wine. Perhaps I will open the French wine when the child is born, drink off the French wine when the child is born on the Night of All Saints. And now I goad myself with the distant past.
So hold your horses, Miranda! Father and Gertrude and Fernandez, sleep! Now take warning, Tremlow!
Wax in the Lilies
“We can sell the tires along the way if we have to, Papa Cue Ball,” said Fernandez, as in pairs we rolled them — white walls, retreads, dusty black tires as smooth as balloons — from his little improvised garage to his old disreputable forest green sedan. “Besides, I couldn’t leave them behind. They might be stolen. Nobody’s honest these days, Papa Cue Ball. The war makes everybody steal.”
“You know best, Fernandez,” I said. “But there isn’t room for all these tires. And what will your bride think of setting off on her honeymoon in a car loaded up to the hilt with black market tires? Not very sympathique, Fernandez?”
“Look, Papa Cue Ball, look here,” letting two fat ones roll to a stop against a fender, and then leaping into the car, leaping back into the dust again, “I throw out the seat — so — I throw out all this ugly stuff from the trunk compartment — what would anyone be doing with all these rags — and we have plenty of room for the tires. As to your second objection,” stooping to the nearest tire, glaring up at me darkly — I hastened to give him a hand — and speaking slowly and in the most severe of his Peruvian accents, “it will be a very short honeymoon, Papa Cue Ball, I assure you. A very short honeymoon.”
I smiled. In the long summer twilight of the trailer camp-soft magenta light through temporary telephone poles and brittle trees, distant sound of schoolboys counting off like soldiers, sound of tropical birds caged up behind a neighbor’s salmon-colored mobile home — and with his little shoulders square and hard under the white shirt, and his trousers, little tight pleated trousers, hitched as high as the second or third rib, and wearing the white linen shirt and crimson braces and the rattlesnake belt and tiny black pointed boots, surely Fernandez looked like a miniature Rudolph Valentino — eyes of the lonely lover, moistened lips — and I could only admire him and smile.
“Short but passionate, Fernandez?” I said then, and laughed.
“Don’t try to be indelicate with me, Papa Cue Ball. Please.” “You misunderstand me, Fernandez,” I said, and paused, frowned, extended my hand. “Since you have married my daughter I thought I could speak to you — well — frankly, and also joyously.”
“OK, OK, good Papa Cue Ball. Let’s forget it.”
“Just as you say, Fernandez,” I said, and reached out, took his small cool hand in mine, shook hands with him. “I share your happiness, Fernandez, I want you to know that,” I said, and for a moment I leaned against the old waiting automobile and my head was light and my mouth was dry and tart and bubbling with the lingering dry aroma and lingering taste of the warm champagne. Because I had considered champagne indispensable. And I had supplied the champagne, carried it to the City Hall in a paper bag, and after the service and in the dim institutional corridor between the City Clerk’s office and a Navy recruiting office we three had sipped our warm champagne straight from the bottle. I had counted on paper cups, but as luck would have it, the water cooler was dry and filled with dust and there was not one paper cup to be found in the holder. Toward the end of the bottle, when there were only a few drops of our celebrative wine remaining, I kissed the bride, there in the dark corridor of the City Hall. And now I remembered the kiss, the champagne, the City Clerk with dirty fingernails, and I wanted only to please Fernandez, to please Cassandra, to make the day end well.
So I did my share of the work and together we rolled the last of the unruly bouncing tires out to the waiting Packard and stowed them aboard. The chickens, little red bantams, and little white frightened hens, were cackling in the makeshift garage and squawking in sudden alarm, and I was tempted to toss them my remaining left-hand pocketful of confetti — yes, I had thrown my fiery flakes of confetti at Cassandra on the hot sidewalk in front of the red brick City Hall — but Fernandez had told me that the chickens were good layers and I thought better of it, left the confetti in the pocket where it was. Instead I stooped and clucked at the chickens, tried to nuzzle a little white stately hen under my arm. But it was a suspicious bedraggled bird and much too quick for me.
“The car needs some water, good Papa Cue Ball,” Fernandez called from the steps of his stubby one-man aluminum trailer — it sat on blocks like a little bright bullet in the fading sunlight — so while Fernandez gathered together his guitar and cardboard suitcase and extra pair of shoes and drew down the shades and locked the trailer, I managed to attach the hose to the outdoor spigot, pried open the enormous and battered hood, braced myself against the smashed-in grille and filled up the great black leaking radiator. Then I flung down the hose — nozzle lashing about in a perverse and frenzied circle, lashing and taking aim and soaking the lower half of my fresh white uniform — and dropped the hood and wiped my hands on an oily rag, straightened my cap, smoothed down the pure white breast of my tunic and gently shooed away the chickens and patted the old battered-up green hood of the car. The sun was going down, the champagne was tingling and Cassandra, I knew, was waiting where I had left her with Gertrude at the U-Drive-Inn.
“Ready, Fernandez?” I called. “Bride’s waiting, Fernandez.”
Then Fernandez must have felt the champagne also because suddenly the three broken car doors were tied shut with twine and I was behind the wheel and the sun was turning to gold the tall white plastic Madonna screwed to the dashboard and Fernandez was sitting up straight beside me with a bunch of crimson flowers in one hand and a large unlabeled bottle of clear liquor in the other. I waved to a fat red bantam hen, and the two of us, Fernandez and I, called good-by forever to his life in the splendors of Tenochtitlan Trailer Village. As we drove out between the rows of mobile homes — wingless airplanes, land yachts, or little metal hovels with flat tires and sagging aerials — suddenly I had the impulse to pat Fernandez on the knee, and did so and smiled at him through the sunlight which was full in my face.
“Courage, Fernandez,” I said softly. “She’s a charming girl.”
“Don’t worry about me, Papa Cue Ball,” cradling the bottle, clutching the flowers in his tiny bright mahogany fist, “Fernandez is no innocent.”
Sand flats, mountains of gravel, abandoned road-working machines, conveyer belts, fields of marsh and silver oil tanks, hitchhiking soldier, a pony ring, and the aged dark green Packard swaying and knocking and overheating on that black highway south.
“Faster, Papa Cue Ball, the hour is very late.”
Nonetheless I thought we had better eat — hamburgers in toasted golden buns at the side of the road, butter and pickle juice running through our fingers, two cold bottles of Orange Crush for the dark-faced groom and perspiring good-natured naval officer who gave the bride away — and my better sense told me that someone must attend to the Packard — unpardonable delay in lonely service station, gallons of gasoline, buckets of water, long minutes in the rest room where we, Fernandez and I, took our first drink of the colorless liquor which burned away the Orange Crush and killed the champagne — so that the sky was dark and the moon was a lemon curd by the time we reached the little suburban oasis called El Chico Rio and honked the horn in a prearranged enthusiastic signal — so many longs, so many shorts, so many trills — and parked in front of Gertrude’s accommodations in the U-Drive-Inn.