That was it. Of course he’d scribbled a signature. But not a hint, not a clue further as to its authorship. I calmed myself, then began to scan the pages in my hands. Not the same typewriter font – an IBM Selectric Elite – as the cover letter: this was an older strike ribbon. But in only a paragraph the style was definitely not Axenfeld’s. I sat back in the big library chair and read:
We’d arrived several days ago, and were already a little bored with the gorgeous Caribbean weather, the cerulean skies, the aquamarine waters, the hot days, the cool nights, the teeming sudden downpours, the swaying palms, the hordes of mosquitoes, mercifully kept at bay by screened windows and doors. But our absent hostess had foreseen everything, so we weren’t at all surprised the fourth morning when an old Jeep Wrangler drove up to the house and a tall, whiplash-thin, colorfully garbed native man stepped out and greeted us. His skin was so dark it shone in the mid-morning sunglare. He looked to be in his mid-thirties and spoke English with the usual Islands lilt and a few odd accentuations and pronunciations of his own.
‘Captain Tommy’ he told us his name was, and he showed us a very curled-up letter he’d been left by the owners of the wonderful house we were vacationing in, mentioning us. Jim remembered who he was instantly. Chiara had said he’d come by the house and check it out. Captain Tommy pointed to the boat that lay anchored at the little back-deck dock, a glamorous red and silver ‘cigarette boat’ speedster right out of some episode of Miami Vice. He told us he’d take us wherever we wanted. Fishing, touring the islands, to distant white beaches, where we’d have privacy. We could even go to a shipwreck if we wanted to dive, but he’d have to warn us, there were barracuda around those wrecks.
So, for the next few days we became not merely houseguests, we became boatguests. We actively and lazily trawled off the back of the boat, fishing for the little clawless, sweet lobster of the area, for skate and yellowback and the unbelievably rich grouper we’d wrap in tin foil and cook on the side-deck barbecue. Captain Tommy took us to all the places he’d told us about that first morning, and then since we enjoyed it so much, and liked him so much, he took us to more. One all-day trip to faraway Turk Island, once inhabited by pirates and although tiny compared to any of the others in the chain, both historical, colorful and festive. Another time he took us to a resort on Pine Cay, where he dropped us off on the dock and said something to a man awaiting us there, who then took us on a single horse shay into the little private town, consisting of a dozen houses stretched out along a single road, and a Tudor-style inn restaurant, which might have been a thousand miles away in upstate New York or outside London, where we had cocktails, an excellent British Sunday dinner of roast beef with all the fixings.
Our final trip with Captain Tommy, however, was to be the biggest surprise of all. It occurred a few days later, our penultimate day at Sapodilla Bay. I spent much of the morning hunting down the completely transparent and logy scorpions that invaded the house so regularly, finding shelter in odd places like where toilet paper was stored under the bathroom cabinets and suchlike spots, causing Jim to skittle out of the john, gasping ‘Paul!’ and pointing indoors wordlessly, fearfully. I saw no reason to harm them: after all, they lived there, while we only visited. So I’d grab hold of the barbecue tongs and carefully locate and lift out the poor, stupid arthropodic things from their dens and toss them into the scrub and cactus gardens surrounding the house.
Usually Captain Tommy would tell us where we were going the day before, but this time he didn’t, and when we kept asking him where we were going and whether we should bring fishing tackle or snorkeling masks, he just said, ‘Bring whatever you be wanting. But today, I’s taking you to a special lunch. Very special. At my friend’s in Grand Caicos.’
We’d tipped him well after each of our trips, and we’d always given him the bulk of whatever seafood we’d caught for himself and his girlfriend, Juanita, to take home to his place or to her family’s house at Blue Hills. Even so we were surprised by this offer. After all, every native to this island was poor, although its tourism board encouraged visitors, builders, and becoming an ‘expat’, i.e. buying land and settling there as a tax shelter, it would be (thankfully to us) years, maybe decades, hopefully never before the place ever caught on. We’d no need for any gift from Captain Tommy. Hadn’t he shown us beaches so pure-sanded white, so vacant we’d not seen another person all day? Hadn’t he shown us the sunken British fort from the seventeenth century we’d dove around in for hours? Hadn’t he shown us how to net a conch, carve it open, scoop out the vanilla-custard center and eat it right there, while we cut up the harder-meat ‘foot’ and sprinkled it with lime juice, which would ‘cook’ it, à la ceviche, in two hours? Hadn’t he shown us more good sights and more wonderful and adventuresome days than either of us had experienced since we’d been pre-adolescents?
He had. So it was as little kids, not knowing what to expect, that we changed into bathing shorts, big-brimmed sunhats, and long-sleeved white T-shirts against the strong sun and leapt into the boat he’d already revved up.
An hour later we stopped seemingly nowhere on the northwestern side of Grand Caicos Island. Originally settled by Tories who’d been on the losing side of the American Revolution, the entire chain had been handed to them as a freehold by a grateful if bitter British government. After New England the land was poor and weather was terribly hot and it was too far off the much-plied sugar and rum shipping lanes to be of much use for trade, if indeed anything on the island could be found to trade. In fifty years, most of the white farm owners had abandoned their plots to their slaves, who then had been freed anyway, so they became the landowners. Being African-American they were less bothered by the weather than Nordic types, and they were able to fish and farm sufficient to their needs, if they kept their families small and their ambitions low. Of all the islands, Grand Caicos had the most and greatest extent of more or less arable soil.
We landed on the jetty, tied up the boat and waited for a man with a late ’40s vintage Dodge pickup truck. Jim and I bounced twenty minutes to a crossroads where we all got out. We walked to a long cinder-block building, a sign on it read ‘Antonio’s Café and Club’.
A more sorry place in a more godforsaken spot you’d never dream to see. Jim and I looked at each other in astonishment. A big rectangular room, containing a half-dozen trestle tables, and a long, deal wood bar. An adjoining kitchen. A man and a woman were working there. No customers but us. Captain Tommy was already inside, greeting them warmly. Cold beer bottles with lime wedges were put on the counter, and throughout the introductions and banter between them our lunch agreed upon.
It was airless indoors, so Jim and I stayed outside, on a little cement terrace set amidst a totally undistinguished bit of yard. There was an unexpected view of a landscape brown and scrubby with no sense of glamour. The land sloped down all before us into a depression that eventually became a large, maybe mile-wide lake. A strangely deep blue-tinted, still-watered lake. The closest arm of it lay maybe a quarter-mile away. But given the flatness of the landscape, all of it was quite visible from this little rise.
Food arrived: typical Islands sandwiches, French rolls with a tasty, hot-flavored, tomatoey, fishy-fillet mass, accompanied by thick-cut greasy potato fries and some turmeric-flavored rice concoction. But we were hungry and all five of us, hosts and guests, slopped it down and washed it down with more beer. We continued to sit at the little table.
Time dragged on. Captain Tommy and Antonio went back indoors drinking. Jim and I remained outside, quietly disappointed, and a little annoyed. I was full and hot and tired, and I was about to lay my head down on the table and sleep, when I noticed a distant pink streak across the pale blue sky. It seemed to hover over the most distant point of the lake, then settle down. We drank and mused over the messy cheap china a while. Another, then another pink distant object wheeled and dropped onto the lake. Jim and I got to talking about some upcoming party back in New York City. All the while we talked, more
pink objects hove into view, and around us began a distant clamor, difficult to assess as to its precise source or significance.
The sky became filled – no, let me say saturated with, then supersaturated with – more of the pink objects, until there were so very many of them we could hardly make out any sky at all. And of course, now that they were closer, we could see what they were: flamingos, big pink flamingos. And all of them wheeled in, circled the lake and dropped to its surface, until the sky, the air, the lake, all of it was covered with pink flamingos. Thousands of them, then tens of thousands of them. All dipping their heads in for shrimp or algae and lifting their long necks and stepping forward. A sea of pink so constantly in motion, a sky of pink so filled with the sound of wings and feathers rustling and honking and calling out, that we sat there absolutely stunned, believing that soon every inch of land as well as sky and water would be covered with them, the noise so infernal and constant and overwhelming a din, we couldn’t speak or be heard.
I don’t remember when exactly it was later on that Captain Tommy came to lift us away from the sight and drag us back to the crossroads.
After we arrived back at Sapodilla Bay, Jim and I never spoke about it. We left at noon two days later. I never figured out what that experience meant. Only that it was overwhelming.
I guess we all need to be overwhelmed every once in a while.
Reuben Weatherbury’s elaborate directions seemed to be important only once I’d gotten off the 405 Highway. Then, I had to look sharp to find my way. During most of the drive down to Irvine, I remained so nervous about the upcoming meeting that I tried to focus on anything but what might occur. Luckily, I had exactly what I needed to do it: I mean – besides the typically cowboy and Indians southern California midday freeway traffic – the fragment Axenfeld had sent.
No question about it, of all three pieces, it was the most unusual. Possibly the most purely ‘literary’. Unlike the others, it might even stand on its own. That it was the work of the same author as the fragment about the kids in the car and the one about Paul and the cabdriver, I had little doubt, even if the syntax and language were more elaborate. But if those two had appeared to be progressive, in at least a chronological sense, this piece didn’t fit into that chronology so much as stand outside it. Leading me to a few speculations. Most prominent among them was that what I had was either truly a trio of unrelated fragments, essays into fiction, experiments in writing even, that Len Spurgeon had written because he had somehow fallen under the influence of various Purple Circlers he’d befriended or been befriended by at various times in the late 1970s or early 1980s, or – conversely – that it was a much larger, more thought-out book, possibly autobiographical, possibly a novel.
There existed considerable pros and cons to this last theory: the biggest pro so far was that the more I looked, the more I found fragments. The second biggest was that I’d expressed this to Dominic De Petrie on-line yesterday and he’d done nothing, said nothing, to bar it. Indeed, he’d led me directly to the next manuscript. Of course, the biggest con was that the fragments didn’t fit together – and, more importantly, none of them fit what I knew so far about Len Spurgeon. But then I knew so very little about him. And the remaining Purples, for whatever reason, were each keeping mum about him. I know, I know, Von Slyke had told me that he and Len had had some sort of S/M relationship. The problem was I wasn’t sure I believed him. Even so, he’d been the first of the three survivors I’d outright asked about Len. Why not try the other two? Why not? Because I was sure Axenfeld would weasel out of it somehow and I was sure that De Petrie would tell me off.
A right-hand sign listing my exit as the third of three suddenly showed up, and I began the task of changing lanes from the fastest to the exit ramp. Not long after I’d gotten where I wanted to, the exit sign itself appeared. As I slowed down along the long curving rampway, I hit the Celica’s brain button and its onboard computer projected the next steps across the windshield. I was to turn right, go along for three traffic lights then turn left.
Another half-dozen turns and more instructions later, I realized that I was driving along a road that encircled the U-Cal Irvine campus. My directions were for a right to a particular road, which I at last arrived at, and thence to a chain of medium-sized parking lots. I was to find a spot among the visitors’ row in the faculty parking. I did so, then got out of the car and looked around. From what he’d said on the phone, I guessed that behind, up that hill and through those single-story buildings, I’d find the English Department. Yes, there was the little campus radio station.
Students – or at least younger people wearing shorts and thin tops – began to appear in ones and twos as I got up one paved path and into a sort of woodsy area of buildings. This campus seemed to be typically late-twentieth-century SoCal in that, unlike earlier colleges like Stanford and Occidental, and unlike virtually all eastern and Midwestern campuses, it hadn’t been designed and laid out for pedestrians, strollers to class, but for cars and drivers. A ring road opening out at points to parking lots that gave onto each distinct area: sciences there, humanities here, etc. Sure enough, as I gazed back I saw a small electric bus pull up, disgorge a few passengers and take one on. Those busses must circulate the campus for those without cars or those who didn’t care to drive from class to class.
Unlike the single-story buildings I’d first passed among, which housed administrative and student-organization offices and appeared from their slapdash architecture to have been put up temporarily if still not replaced after some decades, the two main buildings attached by a common courtyard looked to be staunch and foursquare in their permanence. Built in the late 1960s or early 1970s, they were once-white cast concrete, identical to the least attractive housing projects of the day with their great swaths of pitted ramps and stony balconies. Despite that, the buildings had managed to age far more gracefully than anyone might have expected. This was due to the sylvan setting, the tall straight trees which rose seventy and eighty feet close around the buildings, casting them into a dark green shade flecked with hot sunlight, dropping tendrils of creepers to nearly hide in ivy curlicues the otherwise dreary giant concrete posts, suspending great twisted lianas of blackbrown bark and mossy greens covering and cascading down the edges of each dreadful concrete balcony, the entire ensemble softened and glamorized by the constant birdsong and the sudden eruptions of bright fuchsia and hot honey-orange hibiscus flowers that seemed to bud and bloom out of every possible chink and crack of the crumbling old stone. What must have been industrial-complex monstrosities when erected on this hillside was now a grand old city abandoned to picturesque rot in a jungle.
Indoors, it was basic college building style. I located Weatherbury’s office, knocked and steeled myself before entering. No answer. My guts churned. I knocked again.
The door opened: a middle-aged, heavy-set man with tons of gray-flecked hair in a tank top, running shorts and air shoes.
‘You’re Ross!’ He all but pumped my hand in greeting. ‘C’mon in. Or rather, why not just drop your things? You have any trouble getting here? You thirsty? Hungry? I was about ready to go for my run. You’re dressed to run too. Do you want to wait around here in the office, or wouldn’t you rather join me? C’mon, join me. It’ll be fun! Just drop your stuff. It’ll be safe. I’ll lock up. I’m glad you got here. This is so great!’
Minutes later, I was astonished to find myself jogging alongside Reuben Weatherbury down the ramp of this building, out and around the single-story offices, through the linked parking lots, down and around the gently curving double-lane tarmac road that dropped onto the ring road. Once there, we kept to the right-hand painted-lane bicycle path, along with a few passing bikers and a few other joggers we pretty quickly surpassed.
‘Isn’t this a great afternoon?’ Weatherbury enthused. ‘Don’t you love this place? God! I’m so glad to get out of Texas and into southern California. It was so fucking brown there! You were grateful for a sod of grass and a few straggly
cottonwood! You’re even betterlooking than St George said you were. Great physical shape. You an athlete? Or just work out? Where we’re headed to is the faculty gym. Got a big weights room. You can work out with me. Or just spot me. I’m on a routine. Gotta lose some of this.’ He slapped his abdomen. ‘How is the old man, anyway? St George, I mean. God, I love the guy. No one like him in the world! You should have seen him at the Queer Studies bash the MLA threw in Seattle last April. Someone said he looked like a pawnbroker, spoke like Somerset Maugham and acted like King Farouk! You weren’t there, right? I would have remembered.’
I kept looking at him, nodding, not even trying to answer the constant barrage of his questions, trying to connect this heavy-set, tanned, sporty-looking, suburban hale-fellow-well-met with the nervous, thin Weatherbury I remembered from only a few years back. The thick, kept long in the front and top hair in TV-commentator style and the square face with its slightly pug nose and bushy eyebrows over pale brown eyes set deep in chubby surrounding cheeks seemed undoubtedly to be the same as the man I remembered. And even the old-style brightly metallic, square aviator glasses he was wearing were identical. But everything else was altered. Well, not so much altered as developed in a totally different direction than I would have expected. Not to mention the change in his personality. Then he’d been aloof and unfriendly, taciturn and sarcastic. Now he was almost bubbly.
He veered off onto another rising road and we were soon within the Phys. Ed. complex. Weatherbury headed us into a doorway and we jogged through a long, narrow corridor that seemed to go on a half-mile, before he turned up an internal ramp and from there into the faculty gym and through, to get to a locker room.
The Book of Lies Page 23