“Grow old along with me.
The best is yet to be,” says Sharon.
“That’s right.”
Mr Sartalamaccia has become restless; he works his hat behind him. His fingernails are large and almost filled with white moons. “Your father didn’t build it. Judge Anse was the one that built it.”
“Is that right? You knew them? I didn’t know you—”
Mr Sartalamaccia tells it forlornly, without looking up — knowing no more than the facts pure and simple and hardly believing that we don’t know. Everybody knows. “I built it for him.”
“How did you know him?”
“I didn’t. One morning before Christmas I was just about finished with my store over there and Judge Anse come in and started talking to me. He said — uh—” Mr Sartalamaccia smiles a secret little smile and his head sinks even lower as he makes bold to recall the very words. “—what’s your name? Yes: what’s your name? I told him. He said — uh: you built this store? I said, yessir. We talked. So he looked at me and he said — uh: I’m going tell you what I want you to do. He writes this check. He said — uh: Here’s a check for a thousand dollars. I want you to build me a lodge and come on, I’ll show you where. So I said, all right. So he said — uh—” Mr Sartalamaccia waits until the words, the very words, speak themselves—”Let’s go, Vince, like him and me, we were going to have us a big time. He never saw me before in his life and he walks in my store and writes me a check on the Canal Bank for a thousand dollars. And he didn’t come back for six weeks.”
“Did he like the lodge?”
“I mean he liked it.”
“I see.” I see. There was such a time and there were such men (and Mr Sartalamaccia smiles to remember it), men who could say to other men, here do this, and have it done and done with pleasure and remembered with pleasure. “Have you always been here?”
“Me?” Mr Sartalamaccia looks up for the first time. “I had only been here three weeks! Since November.”
“Where are you from?”
“I was raised in Ensley, near Birmingham, but in nineteen thirty-two times was so hard I started moving around. I visited forty-six states, all but Washington and Oregon, just looking around and I never went hungry. In nineteen thirty four I come to stay with my brother in Violet and started trapping.”
It turns out that Mr Sartalamaccia is a contractor and owns the housing development next door. He has done well and he wants my duck club for an addition. I ask about the houses.
“You want to see one?”
We follow him along a hog trail to a raw field full of pretty little flat-topped houses. He must show us one abuilding. I take pleasure in watching him run a thumb over the sawn edges of the sheathing. Sharon does not mind. She stands foursquare, eyes rolled back a little, showing white. She is sleepy-eyed and frumpy; she looks like snapshots of Ava Gardner when she was a high school girl in North Carolina.
“You know what’s in this slab?” The concrete is smooth as silk.
“No.”
“Chance number six copper pipe. Nobody will ever know it’s there but it will be there a long time.” I see that with him it is not purely and simply honesty; it is his own pleasure at thinking of good pipe in a good slab.
Back at the hummock, Mr Sartalamaccia takes me aside and holds his hat away to the east. “You see that ditcher and doozer?”
“Yes.”
“You know what that’s going to be?”
“No.”
“That’s the tidewater canal to the Gulf. You know how much our land is going to be worth?”
“How much?”
“Fifty dollars a foot.” Mr Sartalmaccia draws me close. Again he tells it as the veriest piece of news. Deal or no deal, this is a piece of news that bears telling.
Later Sharon tells me I was smart to trick him into revealing the true value of my duck club. But she is mistaken. It came about from the moment I met him that thenceforward it pleased him to speak of the past, of his strange odyssey in 1932 when he gazed at Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park and worked on the causeway to Key West and did not go hungry — it pleased him to speak with me of the past and to connive with me against the future. He speaks from his loneliness and together we marvel at the news of the canal and enjoy the consolation of making money. For money is a great joy.
Mr Sartalamaccia has become possessed by a secret hilarity. He gives me a poke in the ribs. “I’ll tell you what we can do, Mr Bolling. You keep your land! I’ll develop it for you. You make the offsite improvements. I’ll build the houses. We’ll make us some money.” He shrinks away in some kind of burlesque.
“How much do you think we can make?”
“Well I don’t know. But I can tell you this.” Mr Sartalamaccia is hopping in a sort of goat dance and Sharon stands dreaming in the green darkness of the glade. “I’ll give you fifteen thousand for it right now!”
Our name is Increase.
Sharon and I spin along the River Road. The river is high and the booms and stacks of ships ride up and down the levee like great earth engines.
In the Shell station and in a drift of honeysuckle sprouting through the oil cans and standing above Sharon with a Coke balanced on her golden knee, I think of flattening my hummock with bulldozers and it comes back to me how the old Gable used to work at such jobs: he knew how to seem to work and how to seem to forget about women: stand asweat with his hands in his back pockets.
It is a great joy to be with Sharon and to make money at it and to seem to pay no attention to her. As for Sharon: she finds nothing amiss in sitting in the little bucket seat with her knees doubled up in the sunshine, dress tucked under. An amber droplet of Coca-Cola meanders along her thigh, touches a blond hair, distributes itself around the tiny fossa.
“Aaauugh,” I groan aloud.
“What’s the matter?”
“It is a stitch in the side.” It is a sword in the heart.
Sharon holds a hand against the sun to see me. “Mr Bolling?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the price Mr Sartalamaccia first mentioned?”
“Eight thousand dollars.”
“He was really gon mess you up.”
“No he wasn’t. But if it hadn’t been for you, I’d have taken the eight thousand.”
“Me?”
“You got me to come down here.”
She assents doubtfully, casting back in her mind with one eye screwed up.
“Do you know how much you saved me, or rather made for me? At least seven thousand dollars and probably a great deal more. I’m obliged to give you ten percent.”
“You’re not giving me any money, son.”
I have to laugh. “Why not?”
“Ain’t nobody giving me any money.” (Now she catches herself and speaks broadly on purpose.) “I got plenty money.”
“How much money do you have?”
“Ne’mind.”
By flexing her leg at a certain angle, she can stand the Coke on a facet of her knee. What a structure it is, tendon and bone, facet and swell, and gold all over.
I go home as the old Gable, asweat and with no thought for her and sick to death with desire. She is pleased because, for one thing, she can keep quiet. I notice that it makes her uneasy to keep up a conversation.