“Ahoy, Peter Poor!” came the far-off sound of Miranda’s voice, and I knew that Cassandra was right and that we were heading into port, heading in toward our berth at the rotten jetty. Peace at last.
But then: “Skipper? Are you well enough to show Red what you have on your chest? I’d like him to see it if you don’t mind.”
Resisting, mumbling, begging off, trying to push her little hand away, but it was no use of course and she peeled away the layers and smoothed out the hairs with her own white fingers until the two of them leaned down together — two heads close together — and looked at me. Their ears were touching.
“That’s the name of my husband. Red. Isn’t it beautiful?”
He agreed that it was.
“Where’s the Salerno kid?” I asked, and it was a thick green whispered question. “Don’t you want to show him too?”
But Red was already helping her up the ladder and we were coming in.
And then Miranda was waving from the end of the jetty: “Ahoy, Peter Poor, welcome home!” And half a dozen stray young kinky-faced sheep were huddled in front of her on the end of the jetty and calling for mother.
“Boy, oh boy, are you a sight!” Miranda said. And then they kissed, and from where I sat propped on the jetty I looked and saw our skins piled high amidships on the Peter Poor. Our wretched skins. And above the pile with the black strap looped over his steel hook and the rest of it hanging down, Jomo was standing there and holding out his arm and grinning.
“Got something of yours, Miranda,” he called. “You want it?”
And laughing, and arm in arm with Cassandra: “You bet your life,” she cried, “bring it along!”
Silence. Shadows. A moonlit constellation of little hard new blueberries against the picket fence. An early spring. The glider was jerking back and forth beneath me and grinding, squeaking, arguing with itself like a wounded crow. And the bottle of Old Grand-Dad lay at my foot and I sat with glass in hand.
“Now go to bed, will you, Skip? My God. She’s probably gone to the show with Bub. That’s all. What’s wrong with that?”
The Labradors came out of their kennel, one head above the other, and looked at us — at me in the painful shadows of the glider and at Miranda sitting on the porch rail with her head against the post and one big knee beneath her chin — and sat down on their black bottoms and began to howl. The Labradors, Miranda’s blunt-nosed ugly dogs, were howling for my own vigil and for Miranda’s silhouette, because Miranda was wearing her black turtle-neck sweater and a Spanish dancer’s short white ruffled skirt which the raised knee had slipped into her solid lap like a pile of fresh white roses.
“Even the dogs know she’s not with Bub,” I said, cracking the neck of the bottle quickly and gently on the lip of the glass, “nobody can fool those dogs, Miranda. Nobody. They’re not howling for the fun of it.”
Wasn’t she looking at her fingernails in the moonlight? Wasn’t she studying the tiny inverted moonlit shields, one hand curved and fluted and turning at arm’s length in front of her face, and then the other, peering at her enormous hands and yawning? Of course she was. Because it was May and time for Miranda to appraise her big waxen fingernails by light of the moon. And even in the chill of the late May night I knew there would be no goose flesh on her big waxen silhouetted leg, no hair on the smooth dark calf.
“You’re an old maid, Skip. Honest to God.”
And staring out at the chestnut tree that was trying to pull itself into leaf once more, I lifted my chin and smiled and drooped the comers of my mouth: “I’m afraid I can’t say the same for you. Far from it. But I tell you, Miranda,” tasting the iodine taste of the Old Grand-Dad on my heavy tongue, sitting on the head of a spring and holding it under, “I’ll give her five more minutes, just five, Miranda, and then I’m going to Red’s shack and pray to the BVM. that I’m still in time.”
She laughed.
But I meant it. Yes, I meant still in time, because there had been the rest of March and April with no more mishaps, nothing but Cassandra suddenly light on her feet and fresh and helpful around the house, Cassandra spending all our last days of winter walking from room to room in the old clapboard house with Pixie held tight in her arms and some kind of song just audible in her severe little nose. Now it was May and Cassandra had changed again and as I must have felt and was soon to know, it was the last of my poor daughter’s months. So still in time. I needed to be still in time. Because of March and then May and then June and the last thoughts, fragments, high lights of the time that swept us all away.
“Laugh if you want to, Miranda,” I said. “You have nothing to lose.”
“For God’s sake, Skip,” looking my way, plucking the ruffles, resting a long dark hand on the angle of the silhouetted thigh, “and what about you, Skip? What about you?”
She must have known what I had to lose since she destroyed it for me. She must have known since she arranged for the destruction, nursed it, brought it about, tormented both herself and myself with its imminence, with the shape of the flesh, the lay of the soul, the curving brawn that was always gliding behind her plan. And what a vision she must have had of the final weeks in May, since the abortive outcome had already been determined, as only she could have known, on a windy day in March.
So I was about to tell her what I had to lose, was sitting forward on the edge of a broken-down glider and collecting myself against the loud irritating pattern of her asthmatic wheeze — she was still propped on the veranda rail with her long heavy legs exposed, but she was wheezing now, staring at me out of her big dark invisible eyes and wheezing — when the black hot rod shot around the comer by the abandoned Poor House and roared toward us down the straightaway of the dark narrow dirt road, honked at us — triple blaring of the musical horn — and disappeared among the fuzzy black trunks of the larches which were tall and young and mysterious in our brimming spring. And I jumped from the glider and reached the rail in time to see the fat anatomical silver tubes on the side of the engine, the silver disks masking the hub caps, the little fat squirrel tail whipping in circles on the tip of the steel aerial, and, behind the low rectangles of window glass, the two figures in the cut-down chariot for midnights under a full moon. It was traveling without lights.
“You see?” I said, “there she goes! And with Jomo — in Jomo’s hot rod, Miranda — not with Bub. Who’s the old maid now, Miranda?”
Old Grand-Dad flat on the floor. Kitchen tumbler sailing out and smashing, splintering, on the roof of the kennel. And I was off the porch and once more running after my destiny which always seemed to be racing ahead of me on black tires.
“Wait a minute, Skip,” she cried then, “I’m coming with you!”
So once again with Miranda I entrusted myself to the other hot rod that was still behind her house — orange and white and blue and bearing the number five in a circle on the hood — but this time I myself sat at the wheel and this time, thanks to Bub who had worked on the car as Miranda had said he would, this time that hot rod was a racing vehicle with a full tank of high-octane gasoline, and this time it was spring and the tires were pumped up tight and the fresh paint was bright and tacky.
“Now, Cicisbeo,” I muttered, and we swung out onto Poor House Road, took up the chase.
No lights. No muffler. No windshield, no glass in the windows, and I was low in the driver’s seat with my foot pushed to the hot floor and my fat hands slick and white on the smooth black steering wheel. Miranda crouched beside me, long hair snapping out on the wind and white skirt bunching and struggling in her powerful arms.