Needless to say, the model Tommy had wanted wasn’t for sale. Or, rather, it wasn’t for sale to them. The native who had made it explained to Tom and Martha, through the slurred intermediary of the old Anglo wino, that it was a cult object, and, as such, could be bought only by a member of a different clan to his own; one that stood in a special — and obscure — relation to it.
‘As you can see,’ the wino croaked, ‘it is an absolute top piece of workmanship, yeah. A Gandaro spirit wagon — but then, you knew that.’
What was knowledge? God knows, Tom always tried to read up on the culture of the places the family visited, and this vacation had been no exception. Before the Brodzinskis left home, he had given himself kaleidoscopic migraines reading stuff on the web. Was it the surreptitious joints he smoked in front of the screen, or the way the luminous info-panels slid across it? Tom couldn’t be sure, but, instead of grasping the details, he found them slipping between his numb mental digits.
This much Tom did know: these upland tribes — the Gandaro, the Ibbolit and the Handrey — were less austere and mystical than the desert dwellers. Their magic was tempered, both by the warm rains of their cloud forests and the long history of contact with aliens. They believed in a kind of can-do, can-get approach to their spirits, importuning them through the agency of these talismans: finely wrought models, depicting those goods and attributes that they wished for themselves.
Hence, this particular model, which was a 1:10 scale version of the very four-wheel-drive minivan they were sitting in. Right down to the iridescent blue paint job, the ludicrous flying-vee spoiler, the bulbous wheel arches and tinted windows. It had been fashioned with exquisite cunning from tin cans, hammered flat, seamed and then soldered together. Now it lay in the lap of its Gandaro creator, and he stroked its metallic curves as if it were a much loved child.
The contrast between the primitivism of the model and the sophistication of its subject imbued it with a curious potency, even if you gave no credence whatsoever to its magical properties. Tom, himself, wanted to take it from the thickset hillman with the bone nose plugs. And Tommy Junior — who had extracted his broad rear end from the back of the car with his usual difficulty — stood in the dusty shade, screwing up his gross features, overcome by the loss of that thing that he had never possessed, and began to keen.
The cigarette was finished. All that remained was a fang of ash curling up from its speckled gum. The cigarette was finished — his last — and Tom also felt overwhelmed by the loss of that thing that he had never possessed: some deep and primordial sense of healing satiety, a patch on his ruptured heart. Vainly, he cast about once more for the ashtray that wasn’t there; and then, in a moment of utter unthinking, he flipped the butt into the sodden air.
It arced up, end over end, then, for an instant, hung at the zenith. Tom bade it a fond farewell, for, as it described its neat parabola, it was defining his own new moral compass. I’m a better man, he thought, a much better man. Then, as the butt fell towards the balcony below, the dream Tom had had the preceding night, as he fretted in their fetid bed in the Tree Top Lodge, high in the cloud forest of the Handrey, came back to him.
Martha, sitting on a rattan chair, staring down between her parted thighs, as the slick, oily pool of blood on the floor plipped and plopped.
‘I’m spotting again, Tom,’ she had said in a low, venomous tone. ‘I’m spotting again — and it’s your fault.’
There was a long, drawn-out howl from the balcony below, as of an animal caught in some fiendish trap. Confused at first, assuming that the kids were fighting in the apartment, and one of them had banged their head, Tom started towards the sliding doors. But Martha, having heard the howl as well, confronted him in the entrance, bulges of fresh-showered flesh cinched by her towel.
Together, they strode to the balustrade and looked over. The old man was balled up on the lounger. His hands and those of his young mistress both clawed at the mess of disarranged hair on his smoky scalp.
Realizing what had happened right away, Tom called down: ‘I’m sorry! So sorry — I wasn’t thinking.’
The old man was still twitching and howling. Martha looked at Tom with accusatory eyes. The native mistress had found what she was searching for, and brushed clear of the lounger the last smoking shreds of the butt, which scattered on the white tiles.
‘Why you fuggin do that?!’ she spat up at them. ‘Why you? You damn bloody fool, you!’
Later, when they had managed to calm the kids down, Martha took them all out for a walk, and a guilty, junk-food supper at Cap’n Bob’s, the open air café on the ’nade.
It took half an hour for Tom to summon up the courage of his contrition; then he tiptoed down the bare stairs, padded along the covered walkway and knocked on the door of the odd couple’s apartment. The native girl answered it, and, despite the fluster of his own disgrace, Tom was still disappointed to see that she had repositioned her sarong to cover her breasts.
‘Oh, you.’ She pointed a damning finger at him. ‘What you wan’? Wha’chew doin’ down ’ere, yeah? Wha’chew wan’ with me?’
‘I–I came to see how he’s doing.’ Tom felt juvenile under the girl’s knowing gaze; her brown eyes held the eternal powers of youth and sexual vitality.
And what did the girl see? Another Anglo tourist, the same as all the rest? He wasn’t in bad shape for a man of his age — he had all his own hair — but there was no disguising the fact that Tom Brodzinski had only ever had average looks to begin with. His was a face, he knew, that cried out to be ignored: his nose small and lumpy, his cheekbones ill defined, his chin irresolute. His eyes, like the girl’s, were brown, but they held nothing more than a certain mildness, together with the bafflement of middle age. Even Tom’s height and build were — if such a thing is possible — dull. Average.
Without more ado, the girl led Tom into the smaller of the two bedrooms in the apartment. He knew this was so, because the layout corresponded to that of his own. Here, on a low, narrow, single bed, lay the victim of his butt, apparently naked beneath a thin, floral-patterned sheet. There was a compress, or face cloth of some kind, over the old man’s face. He looked corpse-like, and Tom stuttered, ‘I–I don’t m-mean to. .’
Rousing himself, the old man removed the cloth. Where the butt had burned his scalp, a blister the size of a grape rose midst the pathetic dyed hairs. A beam of light, hard and metallic, probed between the curtains pulled across the tiny window, clearly illuminating the gleet in this cyst.
The old man’s jaw was slack, and turkey wattles shivered beneath it. His hand — which he held out to Tom — was caricatured by arthritis, yet, when he spoke, his voice was surprisingly deep and powerful. ‘Reginald,’ he said. ‘Reginald Lincoln the Third.’
‘Tom.’ Tom took the hand and subjected it to considerate pressure. ‘Brodzinski — the first of the line. Lissen, I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this dumb. . this dumb thing. Crazy, I don’t know what I was thinking; I mean, I guess I wasn’t thinking at all.’
‘C’mon. .’ Lincoln released Tom’s hand, and indicated that he should sit beside him on the skimpy bed. ‘We all do dumb things,’ the old man continued. ‘I know I have. It was an accident; don’t be too hard on yourself.’
‘But a cigarette, Jesus, in this day and age that’s an offensive weapon, even if you don’t, like, hurl it at someone.’