by Haven Kimmel
“Gorgeous houses.”
Thomas nodded. “Those are the ones that survived Camille in sixty-nine. To natives, all time is measured before and after.”
Gulfport had a small college right there on the highway, but Cassie didn’t see any students. A live oak in front of the building was so large, and had so many elephantine, twisting branches, that a tree house had been built in it and could be seen from the road.
Cassie turned to look at it as they passed.
“The Friendship Oak, that tree is called. Pre-Columbian. A lot of kissing goes on up there.”
“You would know, I guess.” Cassie gave him a slight smile.
“Not me, no ma’am. I get my information from those far more morally dubious than myself.”
They passed a casino designed to look like a pirate’s ship.
“What brings you down south?”
She shrugged. “Curiosity. What about you?”
“The same. And I needed to simplify my life.”
“But you miss home?”
“Off and on. I’ve been gone a long time. I want you to see something,” Thomas said, turning north on a busy four-lane road. Cassie thought at first that they were in downtown Gulfport, but the town seemed to disappear, replaced by low-slung buildings, one after another. Every other business, it seemed, was a pawnshop; between them were E-Z Cash windows where soldiers from Keesler Air Force Base were getting advances on their pay. There were body shops and strip clubs, but the vast majority of the buildings contained treasure in hock.
“We like to keep things right out in the open on the Gulf. No messing around with subtlety.” Thomas turned around and drove back to 90, went left. The pawnshops were lined up outside the casino doors, too. “We’re almost to Biloxi. You ready for lunch? We could go to Mary Mahoney’s, it’s a place tourists like to visit, but it’s still local. I have breakfast there a lot. Close to my house.”
“Sounds fine.”
“There’s another big tree there.”
“Well,” Cassie said, rolling her window down, taking in the fog. “I wouldn’t want to miss that.”
They ate lunch in a courtyard surrounded by lacy wrought iron painted white, visited the massive Spanish oak, and went for a walk on the beach. The pale sand stretched the entire thirty miles of Harrison County, Thomas told her, but the water wasn’t good for swimming. When she asked what he’d been doing in New Orleans that morning, Thomas said he’d come to find her. “Since it was my day off and all. I mean, I wasn’t doing anything else. And what were you doing there, Cassie, if you don’t mind my asking?”
She crossed her arms against the Gulf wind. “I went for coffee. It being a coffeehouse.”
“Mm-hmm. It still seems like there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“There’s a lot of that going around.”
They pulled in to the driveway of a lovely house on Reynoir Street, a 1930s cottage. The front porch was wide enough for rocking chairs, a wicker settee, and small wicker side tables.
“This is your house?” Cassie asked, admiring the fresh paint, the oak door, the polished brass numbers on a post next to the steps.
“No, I live in the gardener’s shed behind the house. Miss Sophie lives here, my landlady. We’ve been together seven years.”
“So she’s like family.”
“She is my family,” Thomas said, stepping out of the truck. “We should introduce you.”
The backyard was a model of order against abundance, the flower beds thick with camellias and vines Cassie didn’t recognize. They walked onto the screened porch, where there were more rocking chairs, a brass plant stand, and a table on which waited a green pitcher and two metal drinking glasses. As Thomas knocked on the back door, Cassie could smell the inside of the house: lilacs and something earthy, an undertow.
“Miss Sophie?” Thomas called, opening the door.
“I’m in the sitting room, Thomas,” Sophie called. “Don’t make me get up.”
They walked through the spotless kitchen with its tall cabinets and hulking gas stove, through the dining room, which appeared to have been unused for years, and into the sunlit front room. Miss Sophie was in her late seventies, Cassie guessed, a big woman in a faded housedress. Her right foot was swollen and propped up on a stool; her white hair was gathered into a knot at her neck.
“Oh,Thomas, you have taken a lover,” she said as Thomas bent down to kiss her, “if I’d known, I’d have baked a cake.” She gestured for Cassie to sit beside her on the rose-colored sofa.
“Miss Sophie, this is Cassie. She’s visiting from Indiana.”
“How do you do,” Cassie said, offering her hand.
“My favorite greeting, so old-fashioned.” Miss Sophie pressed Cassie’s hand between her own. “I do quite well, except that my circulation is poor and I have to keep this foot propped up. I call what we’re sitting on a davenport, but Thomas calls it a couch. What do you call it?”
“I’d call it a couch,” Cassie said.
“And this behind my head Thomas calls a doily, but I say it’s an antimacassar. How about you?”
“I think I’d say a doily.”
“Do you cut the grass or mow the lawn?”
“Mow the lawn. It’s my least favorite job.”
“We can both agree, I think, that to our left is a rocking chair, and Thomas, you should sit down on it. Let me ask you another thing: say I handed you a green, very mild bell pepper out of my garden. What would you say that was?”
“Where I live, we call it a mango.”
“Huh,” Miss Sophie said, staring at Thomas. “She’s from exactly the same place you are, Thomas.”
Above them a ceiling fan whisked around quietly, and in the corner an heirloom grandfather clock kept hushed time. On the table beside Miss Sophie lay a copy of Faulkner’s Light in August, battered, and with bookmarks in fifteen different places.
“My mother loves Faulkner,” Cassie said.
“He is my god,” Miss Sophie said, crossing herself. “When I write his name, I leave out all the vowels, so as not to earn his wrath. You go into the city, Thomas?”
“Just to the coffee shop,” Thomas said, leaning forward in the rocking chair, his elbows on his knees. In this light Cassie could see how green his eyes were, the sharpness of the bones in his face. “That’s where I found Cassie,” he said, “drinking coffee, black. I saw Bode, too.”
“Ah. Will I get to go back to 1929 after all? I’d like to get ahold of Grandmother’s engagement ring before she loses it.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it as yet.”
“I have a dream about 1929, has Thomas told you?” she asked Cassie, who shook her head. “I am on a train. I’m walking the length of it, looking in every cabin for my mother, and there, in one of them, is Joe. He asks me if I remember the party in 1929, when my father wore the Chief tuxedo and gave that young girl a gift.”
“What does that mean, do you suppose?” Cassie asked.
“No way to know with dreams.”
“I’ve never heard of a Chief tuxedo,” Thomas said, “that’s what I say every time we talk about this dream.”
“Is your name short for Cassandra?” Miss Sophie’s face was barely lined, but her teeth were not her own, and her earlobes were stretched like crepe paper.
“No, it’s Cassiopeia.”
“My goodness, what a blessing. What do you do in this world?”
Cassie cleared her throat. She had wandered into this living room as if onto the set of a comic opera already in progress. “I play pool for money.”
Miss Sophie barked out a laugh, and Thomas sat back in the rocker.
“You’re a what, a billiard shark?” Miss Sophie was so delighted she nearly bounced.
“I play American pool, not English billiards, and I’m not a shark. That would be a person who pretended not to be a good player, then stole the money of her opponent. I just announce myself, I say I’ve come to a place to play their best, and for money
, and that person is called. Or I wait for him.”
“I’ll be damned,” Sophie said, shaking her head.
“And I’m the person in my own town other hustlers would come to beat, except that it doesn’t happen anymore. There are very few of us left.”
“And do they, would they beat you?”
“No,” Cassie said. “No, they wouldn’t.”
Miss Sophie waved her hand in front of her face. “My interest in this is so sudden it feels lewd. Well, Thomas,” she said, smiling at him, “it looks to me as if you’ve met your match. The cosmic wheel and all that. Now, go take a walk or visit the library, have an impromptu prayer meeting, whatever young people do these days. I’ll make some dinner.”
The gardener’s shed was at the very back of the property, partially shaded, a clapboard square, a forest-green door, a green tin roof. There were rosebushes climbing a trellis at one corner, morning glories woven through a small fence, and red and white azaleas in bloom all along the sunny side.
“I’d lock this door, but there doesn’t seem to be a key.”
Inside was a single room with a small kitchen at one end, an enclosed space for a bathroom, everything finished like a yacht. The wide plank floor was scarred, swept clean. On top of an old potting table was a place mat and a silver napkin ring, and at the other end, books stacked six and seven deep, piles of papers and file folders. A double bed with no frame, covered by a threadbare quilt, filled one wall, leaving just enough room for a small nightstand. A matchbook propped up one of the nightstand’s legs. On the other wall were an overstuffed chair and a reading lamp.
“I’m at the limits, probably, of how much I can pare my life down,” Thomas said.
Cassie walked toward the kitchen. There were three copper-bottomed pans of different sizes hanging from hooks under the cabinets, a French press, a yellow can of chicory coffee. “Did you pare your life down on purpose?”
“No; that was an exaggeration. I came here empty-handed.”
The crazy quilt had a faded green border. Cassie lifted up the edge: the backing was old burlap sacks from the Louisiana Sugar Company. She wanted to stay here, if not in this very room, then somewhere nearby and with nothing. On Thomas’s nightstand was a lamp with a paper shade covered with fading roses, darkened, and one small gold picture frame. A boy and girl on a wooden swing set, both high above a flooded backyard. The water looked to be two or three feet deep. The children were looking at the camera, their faces lit with unguarded joy. The boy was undoubtedly Thomas; there was the same curly hair, the same hardness of the chest and shoulders.
“Who’s this little girl?”
“I’ve lost track of her.”
Cassie studied the girl, her dark hair and narrow face. “That moment in the truck, when I fell asleep, I was seeing my sister on a swing set.” The backyard was flooded, the children were swinging above it. “A town not far from ours used to flood, back in the late sixties, early seventies. Something about the water table, I can’t remember. There was a photograph in the paper once, a man canoeing down the main street.”
“Interesting,” Thomas said, looking in the refrigerator. “Would you like something to drink? There’s water, or … water, it looks like.”
Cassie put the picture back where she’d found it. “You know what, I’m actually—I’m really tired. I’ve traveled a long way, and I’m tired.”
He turned and walked toward her, his hands out as if he was afraid she might fall. “Come here, sit down with me.” He pulled the quilt down off one of the bed pillows. “Lie down here. I’ll rub your shoulders.”
She slipped off her boots, then pulled her shirt out of her jeans and lay down, facing away from the center of the bed. Thomas lay down behind her; when his hand closed around her tight shoulder, she closed her eyes. “Feel this muscle,” he said. “Cassie.”
“I’m right here.”
“There’s a mess in my past I’ll never make right, but it doesn’t have anything to do with women. I just want to say that there was a long time where I did everything wrong, and I’ve left that time behind me. But at my very worst, I never, I don’t—”
Cassie rolled over on her back and looked at him. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”
He stared at her, his face inches from hers, then pressed one hand against the side of her head. “My hands are rough,” he said, looking at her mouth.
“Is Bode building a time machine?”
“Yes, he is. Is there someplace you’d like to go?”
Maybe 1919, when Ralph Greenleaf won his first tournament, beating the tuxedoed billiard royalty of the time. She wouldn’t mind being the person losing, as long as she could watch. And she’d love to be in the room with Willie Mosconi, who took over from Greenleaf at the end of his career. With her eyes closed, she could see Mosconi’s hands perfectly, shooting as Paul Newman’s double in The Hustler. Mosconi was another of those men with genetic grace, power. She’d like to be on the set of the film,watching Jackie Gleason—himself a brilliant player—as Minnesota Fats. “It’s hard to choose,” Cassie said, her eyes still closed.
“I’d love,” Thomas said, “now, don’t laugh, to be present when Wittgenstein and Popper had their argument. Apparently a fireplace poker was brandished.”
“Two philosophers. Not so different from what I was thinking.”
Or maybe she’d like to be in New Orleans on the night her parents met—not the moment the battered Jimmy wandered into the Grille, but before that. She’d like to know what hard thing he had propelled his face against, whether he’d won whatever bet he’d placed. Maybe she’d like to meet her mother at twelve, as she was in the photograph she kept on her dresser: thin, dark, secretive, wearing a white dress with a dark sweater around her shoulders, sitting on a tree stump with a Boston terrier on her lap (Laura and Milkweed, written on the back of the photograph in Laura’s young handwriting). Cassie thought about the look on Laura’s face, the way she seemed to be looking directly into the sun without squinting, her ironic smile and crooked bottom teeth.
Or perhaps she wouldn’t travel so far back. Maybe, if she could, she’d choose a year ago. She would take any single day before Laura began to make a certain sound at the beginning and end of every sentence, a rough, wet intake of breath, a slight ragged whistle. At the hospital, pacing the floor or sitting next to Laura’s bed, Cassie had asked herself repeatedly, Didn’t you hear it? And she had, she’d heard it the way you might hear something in the middle of the night then turn away from it. An intruder. And hadn’t Cassie noticed that Laura talked less and less, had spent more time reading and writing in her journal? She’d told the doctor, My mother is a moody woman, and discontent, but what she’d meant was: How do we know which emergency to treat? The doctor, a distracted man who looked barely old enough to drive, whose pupils were irregularly sized and whose hands shook, said, “You’ll probably feel some anger at your mother for withholding her diagnosis,” said it without looking at her, and Cassie had seen, as if in a vision, him underlining the statement in a textbook on patient care, and she flew out of her chair, her hands in fists. He tried to back up but bumped into the desk in the waiting room. In a split second she was nose-to-nose with him. “You think so? You think I might feel some anger, you hopped-up little fuck?”
Or maybe she’d ask to go back only two weeks, to the day Laura collapsed and Cassie couldn’t be reached. She’d gone to Bud’s in the morning, then out with a work crew laying hardwood floor in a renovation on the other side of the county. She’d gotten off early and driven home slowly, enjoying the weak March sun, nursing the tendonitis in her right elbow with ibuprofen. The wind blew through the truck. She wore a camouflage cap that advertised industrial cable. When she got home, there seemed to be no one there; Laura wasn’t in the kitchen, Edwin wasn’t visiting, Belle wasn’t at the table proofreading someone else’s scholarship. Cassie found her sister in the living room with the shades pulled. Laura had spent the day, Belle said, in bed, under an a
fghan, and finally Belle thought to check on her, to ask if she needed anything, and Laura had been very sick, that’s how Belle described it. She was worried, too, about a bloodstain on the old carpet in Laura’s room, because the EMTs had a terrible time finding a vein. What should we do about the stain, Cassie, should we try to clean it, should we leave it, should we cut it out and burn it, keep it?
“My mother is dead,” Cassie told Thomas, who winced. She gasped, crying suddenly so hard she couldn’t consider him a stranger, she felt they’d been drawn together by a natural disaster, all boundaries erased.
“Shhhh,” he said, pulling her against him, wrapping his arms around her until she could hardly breathe.
Cassie thought he must have lost his mother, too, to live as he did at the edge of the continent. Laura had hoped, she’d written in her journal, that whatever befell her daughters, they would not be damaged at the level of instinct, that exact phrase. Her instinct was to lift Thomas’s T-shirt above his head, which she did, he allowed her to, then wipe her eyes on it. “Go ahead and use my shirt,” he said. And then she took off her own and lay back down; Thomas hooked his legs around hers and pulled her against him until their bellies were touching. She thought to say, I don’t want to go back in time, I want to stop it, I want to stop time. And then she stopped it.
For dinner Miss Sophie made red beans and rice, and turnip greens, served with sweet tea. They sat at the kitchen table, allowing the dining room to go on undisturbed. Thomas sat next to Cassie; he had a light touch, he let his hand hover near her shoulder or on her knee, he wrapped his fingers around the nape of her neck briefly, then removed them. She had never felt such a thing, so fleeting; she felt like she’d been drinking homemade liquor.
Miss Sophie told the story of how she’d hired Thomas to do landscaping all those years ago, and how she’d gotten so accustomed to having him around, she’d asked him to stay. She said she noticed how, of an afternoon she waited at the window like a collie for him to get off his day job. It had been so long, she said, since anyone had interested her.