by William Boyd
“Really? I hadn’t actually noticed.… I thought …” Henderson changed the subject. “Bryant said something about the paintings—your father’s paintings—already being sold.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Some months ago. Freeborn sold them.”
Henderson felt a twinge of alarm. “Are you sure?”
“I guess so.”
“There must be some mistake.”
“You tell me.”
“Who did he sell them to?”
“Some guy called Sereno. I don’t know. Maybe you’d better ask Freeborn.”
I’d better ask old man Gage, Henderson thought; I’m sure he’ll be fascinated.
“Can I hitch a ride back to the house?”
“Surely. Let’s go.”
They went outside and got into the pickup, Bryant sitting between them. She had put on sunglasses—maybe to hide her blinks, Henderson thought. She seemed very at ease and unconcerned.
They bumped off down the track.
“When I was in Nam,” Beckman began, unprompted, “ ’68, Dac Tro province. No, it was Quang Tri. They called in an air strike on this hostile ville. ‘Cept the fuckin’ air force dropped the bombs right on our fuckin’ platoon. Three dead, six injured. I woke up two days later in a hospital, not a scratch, but just blinking like shit. Haven’t stopped since.”
“God,” Bryant said in awe. “You’ve been blinking like this all these years?”
“You got it.”
“Didn’t you get any compensation? Some sort of pension?” Henderson asked politely.
“For what? I told you, I didn’t have a scratch. I didn’t even get a fuckin’ purple heart. They sent me right back in.”
“Good God,” Henderson said, “that’s barbaric.”
“But at least you weren’t dead,” Bryant said. “Like the other guys.”
“Yeah. That’s something, I suppose.”
They arrived at the house. Alma-May was sweeping the porch.
“Evening,” Henderson said. “Mr. Gage back?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, good.”
“But he’s gone away again. He was looking for you. For to show you the paintings, he said.”
“Bloody hell.… Excuse me.” Henderson looked around him exasperatedly. “Did he leave any message about the paintings?”
“No.” Alma-May swept dust over his shoes. He moved aside.
“Do you know where he is?”
“No.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“No.”
That evening, Henderson and Bryant watched TV after being served something called turnip cakes and a watery ratatouille. Beckman disappeared into his room. From upstairs came the remorseless bass thump of Duane’s rock music. Henderson got a bad headache at about half past nine. He went out into the warm night, stood on the porch and stared at the yellow windows of Freeborn’s mobile home. He found no answer there and so went up to bed.
chapter six
“YEAH, we was on patrol near Loc Tri. No, no, it was Dhat Pho. Man, we was pissed. A real jerk-off patrol. Then we sees this like buffalo thing—kinda like a big cow? you know?—in a paddy field. That’s where the gooks grow their rice.”
“In a paddy field? I see.”
“Yeah. Well, I guess it was about, oh, a hundred and fifty yards away. No, let’s see, maybe a hundred and thirty.” Beckman Gage, elementary-particle physicist, frowned as he tried to recall the exact distance. “Let’s say one-forty. Anyway, so the sergeant says, ‘The first guy to off that buffalo gets a six-pack on me.’ Yeah. Well, I was like carrying the machine gun. The other guys start firing …”
Henderson felt himself nodding off. He’d had a good forty-five minutes of campaign anecdotes since lunchtime.
“… and I laid ten rounds of tracer up its ass. It just sorta disintegrated. Like pink foam!” Beckman gave a dry chuckle and shook his head over the folly of his youthful days.
Henderson looked at his watch. He hadn’t left the house all day in case he missed Gage, but the man hadn’t returned. Bryant had gone shopping with Shanda in Hamburg, which turned out to be five or six miles away. He had been crunching his way through one of Alma-May’s special salads—hard-boiled eggs, raw potatoes, squash and some tough purple leaf—when Beckman had arrived from his lab.
“It was kinda like the time we was doing hearts and minds in Tro Nang. No, Doc Tri—”
Freeborn came in. Henderson never thought he’d even be a tiny bit glad to see him, but he was. All the same he gripped the edge of the kitchen table defensively. However, Freeborn seemed to have forgotten about his deadline and ignored him.
“Beckman, can I have a word? Outside.” He looked darkly at Henderson. He and Beckman went out into the hall.
Henderson heard Freeborn bellow “Shut the fuck up!” at Duane. Then about two minutes later he returned alone.
“Listen, you English dick, the only reason I ain’t breaking your balls is that I love my father.”
Henderson couldn’t follow the logic of this argument.
“I give you one final warning,” he went on. “If you so much as mention the name Sereno to my father you’re a dead man.”
“Look, I just want to do my job and get out of this … out of here,” Henderson insisted. “You and your father can sort out your own problems. I’ve got no ax to grind.”
Freeborn hitched his tight jeans up, and pointed at him.
“I’m going away for two days. If you’re still here when I get back then you get your ass waxed. Got it?”
“Don’t worry. I shall be long gone.” Perhaps it was the anesthetic quality of Beckman’s battlefield yarns but Freeborn’s threats didn’t seem to perturb him that much today.
They looked at each other for a while. Why does this man dislike me so much? he wondered. What little scheme of his has my arrival foiled?
Alma-May interrupted their stare.
“Get out of my kitchen,” she ordered grumpily. “I got to make you-all dinner, your daddy says.”
“What dinner?” Freeborn asked.
“He’s having a big dinner for Mr. Dose here. He’s invited the preacher and his wife.”
“T. J. Cardew? Shit And Mrs. Cardew? Aw no.”
“That’s the only preacher we got. And you-all got to be there, your daddy says.”
Dinner was to be served at seven-thirty. Guests were to foregather in the sitting room downstairs from seven onward. Henderson bathed and put on his last clean shirt. He had only brought three, not anticipating his stay to be so protracted. He knotted his tie and combed his hair. As an afterthought he ran his comb through his densening eyebrows. He’d have to get them cut back soon, like a hedge. It had been one of the most boring days of his life, waiting vainly for Gage to show up. Bryant and Shanda had returned from Hamburg at four o’clock. When Henderson had asked her how she got along with Shanda, she had said it had been “fun.”
He walked down the passage and knocked at her door.
“You ready?” he called in a loud voice.
“I’m drying my hair!” she shouted. “Five minutes!”
They had to shout because Duane was playing his rock music at exceptionally high volume this evening. Henderson wondered if Duane would be honoring them with his presence that evening. He was curious to see what the youth looked like.
Gage himself was due to arrive later—so Henderson had learned—with his two guests, T. J. and Mrs. Cardew. Cardew was the minister in Luxora Beach. Henderson recalled that someone named Cardew had been responsible for the sermonette he’d listened to the other night. He assumed they were one and the same. Were “T. J.” simply his initials or were they some obscure Baptist rank? he asked himself as he walked down the stairs. He heard the clatter of plates from the kitchen and the distant clamor of a raging argument from Freeborn’s mobile home. Good, he thought. With a smile on his face he sauntered into the sitting room.
“Oh,” he said. “Hello again.”
Co
ra Gage had been brought down and had been placed squarely in the middle of the largest sofa. She was wearing a plain black dress and some sort of effort had been made to get her hair in order. She even possessed—Henderson took the liberty of staring—a smear of pale-orange lipstick on her lips. She wore her dark glasses (like pennies on the eyes of a corpse, he suddenly thought) and, inevitably, she was smoking, her pack of cigarettes and lighter nestling in the sag of her lap.
“Help yourself to a jolly old drink,” she said, looking straight in front of her.
“Thank you.”
Set out on a table at one side were various types of whiskey and bourbon, some bottles of beer and what looked like a five-gallon flagon of wine—Californian, he read. With considerable effort he managed to upend this and splash some into a glass and reasonable amounts onto the table. He tried to mop this up with a paper napkin but only succeeded in making it fall apart and also getting his hands wet. With a little thrill of pleasure he wiped his hands dry on the cushions of a nearby armchair.
“Cheers,” he said.
“Oh, jolly old cheers.”
She really was an objectionable young woman, he thought. He stared at her thin body. The black dress was tight enough to reveal slightly out-of-proportion breasts—out of proportion in that someone her size, he felt, really should be flat-chested. He sat down opposite her.
“Pleasant evening,” he said.
“Is it?”
“Well, yes. The weather—”
“Oh, it’s the weather you’re talking about. Of course, the weather. Very English of you.”
“I just thought …”
He didn’t finish. There was a pause.
“Do you know why I dislike the English so much?” she asked.
“I wasn’t really prepared for sun. Funnily enough.”
“I think, of all the reasons—spitefulness, condescension, pseudo-amateurishness—it’s that air of superiority you affect whenever you open your mouths.” She said all this very matter-of-factly, as if she were remarking that Alma-May had the afternoon off on Thursdays.
“It seems unusually warm for April,” he persevered. “But then of course we’re so much further south.”
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that you have this … this international reputation as hypocrites.” She puffed at her cigarette. “The loud claim to be acting in the public interest which in reality disguises a ruthless self-interest.”
“Quite overpoweringly hot yesterday, walking into Luxora. Do you have a rainy season here?”
“We call it winter, in our quaint way.”
“Vague sort of tropical feel, if you know what I mean.”
Ash dropped into her lap. Get your own ashtray, he said to himself cruelly, if you can.
“This sort of smugness, self-satisfaction …”
Henderson curled his upper lip in a smug, self-satisfied sneer.
“… and yet you seem to be genuinely surprised when you’re not treated as number one anymore. Genuinely.”
“It’s extremely kind of—Duane?—to fix my car.” He was not going to be drawn by this girl, no matter how angry he got.
“And you still assume that the rest of the world wants to ape the British way; ape your manners, ape your style, ape your attitudes.”
Something about the repeated use of the word “ape” made him bulge his lower lip with his tongue and allow his hands to dangle, knuckles inward, from his elbows. He crossed his eyes and mimed picking a nit from his hair and popping it in his mouth.
“Really, these are the wildest generalizations,” he said, composing his features, and now rather enjoying himself. It was childish, he realized; like making faces at the teacher’s back as she wrote on the blackboard, but rather wicked fun. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure they were still alone.
“Sad,” she said. “Pathetic.”
The finality in her voice made him suddenly irritated with her. He leaned forward and silently mouthed. “Oh, do fuck off, you stupid woman.” He could see twin images of himself in her opaque lenses, bulging-faced, ex-ophthalmic.
“You too, asshole,” she said, getting to her feet and strolling over to the drinks table, where she poured herself a shot of whiskey. “Still, I enjoyed the show. I liked the ape best.”
Henderson’s hand shook so much that Californian wine slopped over the rim onto his trousers. With a brief drum roll of glass on wood he set it down and dabbed at the stain with his handkerchief. He leaned back in his armchair as a shiver ran the length of his body. He opened his mouth to say something but all that emerged was a thin, reedy piping noise—like a sick or injured bird—but nothing else. His seized brain had gone out of control. No conceptual structures existed to cope with this sort of massive social shame, a gaffe of such epic proportions.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and leaped to his feet in alarm. It was Loomis Gage.
“Sorry to have missed you earlier, Mr. Dores.” Gage seemed not to have noticed Henderson’s starting eyes or oozing brow—he felt like a horse saved from a burning stable, almost whinnying in panic.
“Don’t mention—” The words turned into a cough. He pounded his chest with a fist. “Not at all.”
“I trust Cora’s been looking after you.”
“We’ve been having a most interesting conversation, Dad. Haven’t we, Mr. Dores?”
“Pweep.”
“I want you to meet my other guests.” Gage swept his arm around. “Our preacher from Luxora Beach, the Reverend T. J. Cardew, and his wife, Monika.”
Henderson turned to greet the couple in the doorway. The Reverend T. J. Cardew was a dapper, fleshy, youngish man (mid-thirties, Henderson guessed) with curly black hair and long thin sideburns that terminated sharply at his jawbone. He wore a sober black suit, a red shirt with silver metal tabs on the collar and a loud checked tie. His wife sported a lime-green dress over which she’d thrown a white net shawl. She had square gold-framed glasses and reddish-brown hair, which was wound and back-combed into a beehive. She had a big frame and seemed larger all around than her husband. Her face was sullen, despite her bright-red lips and pale-blue eyelids. The primary colors did little to disguise the fact that she was deeply bored.
Henderson shook hands with them both. He tried not to look at Cora.
“How do you do? How do you do, Reverend?”
“Very nice to know you, Henderson. Just call me T. J.”
Henderson doubted that he’d actually ever be able to do this, but smiled encouragingly.
“T. J. knows Europe well,” Gage confided. “And Monika there is in fact of German origin. Mr. Dores is from England.”
Monika Cardew looked marginally more interested.
“Where in Germany are you from?” Henderson asked dutifully.
“Berlin.”
“We met,” T. J. interjected, “when I was serving there. As chaplain to the Forty-third Airborne.”
“An army bride,” Monika said flatly. She had a noticeable German accent.
“What’ll it be, T. J.?” Gage asked.
“Oh, I think a drop of the Goat, as usual, Loomis.”
“You must try some of this, Mr. Dores,” Gage said, holding up a squat brown bottle. Henderson took it from him and looked at the label. “Henry’s Goat,” he read. “Sour Mash Bourbon.” On the label was a fine engraving of a tethered goat, and in the background a queue of people waiting outside a tumbledown wooden shack.
“Sippin’ whiskey,” Gage said. “The secret of my survival.”
Gage poured him out a large measure in a small glass. Henderson, still shaky from the sudden revelation of Cora’s normal vision, allowed himself a sizable gulp. The liquid had a thick smooth quality and slid down his gullet as easily as an oyster.
“Very pleasant,” he said, before what seemed like a small fragmentation grenade exploded in his stomach. A column of flame rose up his esophagus. He shuffled his feet and breathed thin streams of hot vibrating air out through his nose. Some sort of dazed sm
ile, he hoped, registered on his features.
“Goodness,” he said.
“Sort of creeps up on you,” Cardew laughed unattractively.
Gage administered more drinks and regularly pressed the bell to summon Alma-May.
“That boy sure loves his modern music,” Cardew said, acknowledging the bass rhythms vibrating from Duane’s room.
“Do you like rock music, Mr. Dores?” Cora asked him innocently, lenses unsparingly focused on his face.
“No, I don’t, as a matter of fact. I prefer classical music.”
“You and Cora have something in common, then, Mr. Dores,” Gage said, putting his arm around his daughter. “She is a wonderful pianist. Will you play something tonight for us, honey? After dinner?”
“No.”
“No persuading our Cora.” Cardew beamed. Gage seemed unperturbed by the abrupt refusal. Alma-May came in with a tray of canapés, followed by Freeborn and Shanda Shanda’s eyes were bloodshot and she looked sulky. Henderson stood up and offered her his seat but Freeborn steered her away to a sofa.
“I understand your daughter is with you, Henderson,” Cardew said. “That’s nice.”
“Well, actually,” Henderson began, then decided that it might be as well to leave the reverend in his ignorance. Cardew leaned over.
“I understand too that she’s a very attractive teenager.”
Henderson didn’t know how to respond. “Takes after her mother,” he commented edgily.
“Oh, yes?”
“How is Patch?” Henderson asked.
“Who?”
“Patch. Your dog. Scratching on heaven’s door, with no fear.”
“I’m sorry?”
“In your sermon. On the radio. I listened to it.”
“I don’t own a dog, Henderson. I’m allergic to fur.”
“But you—”
“What you might call poetic license.”
“Some more Goat?” It was Gage dispensing bourbon.
“Please.” Henderson offered his empty glass. He was getting used to its virulence.
Gage seemed in a good mood. His plump face was flushed, his dense hair a little tousled.