by Hob Broun
It was this final gag on the insatiable faith he had tried to instill in her—chasing off friends, confiscating her lipstick and nail polish—that caused her to run away from home, just as her father had done in 1925, heading out right before first light carrying only a couple of crumpled bills.
A mile or two up the road by a house with only a porch light burning, Tildy helped herself to a station wagon with a full tank of gas and the keys inside. She drove nonstop to the outskirts of Biloxi, Mississippi, where the radiator line burst. Leaving the car smoking on the shoulder, she walked into town, to the promenade along the Gulf. Tildy bought her first pack of cigarettes, Lucky Strikes; dangling her legs over the seawall, she taught herself to inhale and spit like a man. Later she frittered away a handful of quarters at a booth where you could win a five-inch lock knife by popping balloons with darts. Finally the gaptooth boy running it slipped her one of the knives on the house.
“I don’t need any favors,” Tildy said sullenly.
“But I like you,” he said. Wayne. His name was stitched over the pocket of his shirt. “Death From Above” was tattooed on his upper arm. “That’s some sweet face. You know, if your hair was a little bit lighter, you’d look just like the White Rock girl.”
Tildy allowed him to drape his arm over her shoulders as they walked to a nearby café. Wayne bought her shrimp-in-a-basket and a big lemonade and sat there watching her eat.
“Man, oh man,” he said. “Look like you ain’t had no food in a week.”
She told Wayne that she’d been studying dance up in New York, but was forced to leave town due to a broken heart. An English movie director. A possessive bastard.
“Dancin’ school, huh?” Wayne nodded and sucked his lips. “You maybe interested in makin’ some dough?”
From the sickroom came a low trilling growl like an animal in heat and then Lucien’s voice, robust as it had ever been.
“Where that girl … Clothilde!”
She scrambled down the hall on cold feet.
“Viens, Clothilde … viens ici.” He beckoned urgently to her. His skin was terribly white, taut, and the bones of his pelvis seemed about to burst through.
“Take it easy. I’ll put the sheet back over you.”
Lucien heaved to one side and grasped at her breasts. Just what kind of connection was he making?
“I’m with you, Papa.” He was squeezing her painfully. “It’s all right. Lie back now.”
“Pas long temps. They take me out there and no coming back. There are things you must hear now, so come. Give your attention.”
“A few minutes. But it’s late, we should both be asleep.”
Lucien buzzed his lips. “I know how late. So I am telling you … Ecoutes, my girl. Sit by me and hold this hand. We must speak of your mother, no keeping from you any longer what was done…. Always I have my suspicions. All the time I am writing to the police about footprints I see by that lake. You remember the lake?”
She remembered. Water a perfect shade of blue. The ripple of skatebugs. The way Harlene bobbed gently in the water so that until the moment she turned over, Tildy thought she was doing the dog paddle in her clothes.
“There was a great crime on that day. That holy day. I speak with a man who knows of the enemy.”
“At the hospital? Your roommate?”
“We live as allies. We share food together. One day I tell him of your mama and how we find her floating there. I see how his face goes tight at this. Bien sur, this man can tell me. I look for him every day, me, until he will surrender this truth. The truth as I have always known it…. In the college at Baton Rouge there were professors who know of my fight. They are Bolsheviks. Juifs, tu comprends? They see how I am exposing them and their plans and the order comes from Moscow I must be destroyed. The assassin is a man named Klein, but he is a coward. He follow me for many weeks, afraid to get close. You remember the fire at work that killed my foreman? No, you were too little, ma Clothilde, but this was Klein. There is rage at his failure. Now Klein himself is in danger. So it was that on that day he finds your mama alone, his time for attack has come. He set on her like an animal and crushed her throat in his hands.”
“Enough, Papa. You’ve said enough now.”
Lucien lifted her hand from the mattress. “You must be strong before this evil. Now it is in you. You have heard it from my lips and must swear to carry out the vengeance.”
Tildy’s upper body sagged in glum exasperation. “Forget it. You don’t need any visions now. It’s long over.” And silently: It’s your own death you should be thinking about.
“There is no limit in God’s sight. Pledge to me.”
Tildy looked at this frail chump of a man in raw lamplight who by his madness had denied her access to basic implements of living, who had deposited in her a charged nugget of himself, magnetized for fakery and sorrow. She realized that all he really meant to say was: Can you do me a favor?
“Sure. I promise. I swear.”
“Bien. It is done.”
He relaxed all at once and she was able to pull free. There were round red marks on the back of her hand. Lucien lay quiet for a few moments, then began to retch. He opened his mouth like a bird and hacked up a twisted rope of mucus that fell across the pillow in a tarry black line. Tildy unfolded his body and wiped him up. He was sweating from every pore.
Hard as she tried, Tildy could not fall asleep. By three o’clock her calf muscles were knotted and she’d been grinding her teeth. The kitchen floor felt gritty under her feet. She drank some water and groped back to the sofa. She masturbated coldly and drowsed finally away with one foot on the floor.
Mrs. Daigle shook her out of it around noon.
“You any better, dear?”
“Was I ill?”
“Looked the picture of it to me. That’s why I let you rest this late.”
Mrs. Daigle left the room but came back five minutes later with a breakfast tray: a segmented grapefruit topped with honey, two slices of dry wheat toast and a mug of some dank herb tea. Tildy dabbed grapefruit juice on her eyelids. From nape to skull, she ached.
Lucien had refused all nourishment. He seemed aware only of large shapes. His friend sat by with a jar of pale green salve that she applied now and then to his chest; and when his wheezing built into an “Oh Jesus,” she would repeat after him. Little hands curled against her throat, she turned to face his daughter and told her not to worry, that it would be soon.
It was a sticky hot day, but Tildy went out in it anyway. She took a long, circular drive on back roads where she could run at 25 with nobody behind her. On the way home, driving into the sun, she nearly struck a black dog that leaped out from some hedges; a little girl came screaming out of the driveway and threw a stick at the car. After that she stopped at an air-conditioned bar and without really thinking about it, downed four straight-up bourbons.
Tildy had no sense of how tanked she was until she got back to the house. Swaying through the kitchen, she embraced Joby Daigle and asked her to spend the night.
“You got the shivers and shakes all on you, that’s all right,” she said, patting Tildy on the shoulder. “You’re entitled.”
Tildy backed away, stood by the screen door looking out. “It’s not that I’m afraid. Not about … Maybe it’s this house in the dark. I hear things.”
“You gonna be fine. We’ll have a little fruit salad, play some bid whist if you like. S’posed to cool off later on. We’ll make it on through till mornin’, long away as that must seem to you. And maybe there’ll be peace by then. Did I mention Lucy turned his back on dinner? He was all drawed up in a knot. Like his face was tryin’ to meet with his knees.”
Tildy pushed the screen door, let it smack shut. Then she did it again. “He’s getting himself ready to go. Is that what you think?” Mrs. Daigle didn’t say anything. “I do too.” She pushed the door again and dodged the backswing as she stepped outside.
But there was no cooling off as the night wore on. Ti
ldy fanned herself with a paper plate. Mrs. Daigle told a long story about a canoe trip she’d taken with her husband in the spring of 1962. Mr. Daigle had been bitten by a turtle. The refrigerator kicked on and made an intermittent noise like someone chewing aluminum foil. Outside, a tow truck, or something like it, went by with its yellow flashers going. Mrs. Daigle recalled the first time she had given Lucy a bath and how he’d tried to pull her in there with him. Tildy wished she had some more whiskey.
Somewhat later, after the brushing of teeth and the distribution of pillows, they went in for a look at the old man. Slack-jawed, pale tongue jutting, he was only half asleep with the sheet bunched around his middle. Slowly, one by one, his fingers rose and fell as though he was doing a piano exercise.
“You go on ahead, child,” Mrs. Daigle said. “I’m gonna make one last try, see if he’ll take a little somethin’ with tea.”
Tildy was first up the following morning. On her way to put on the kettle she peered into her father’s room, saw his face waxen and gray, and knew it was over. She awoke Mrs. Daigle, who wept vigorously but quietly. Then she dialed the police. They promised an ambulance within the hour.
“I hope you know,” Mrs. Daigle stammered, “you was the only thing in this world he’d admit to lovin’.”
What Tildy did not know was that less than twelve hours ago, wanting only to deliver both Lucien and his daughter from further pain, Mrs. Daigle had administered to him, along with the tea, three seeds of the castor bean plant. The seeds contained an extremely toxic substance, called ricin, that brought on circulatory collapse.
The ambulance driver wanted to know where he was supposed to take the body and Tildy didn’t know what to tell him. She got out the Ville Platte yellow pages, phoned the mortuary with the largest display ad, and asked what they were charging for a no-frills cremation.
That upset Mrs. Daigle no end.
“You can’t do it. That man done lived his whole life in the light of the Church. He held on to that faith all the way through, even when he seen there weren’t goin’ to be no miracle for him. He’s jes got to have the rites. And a proper burial.”
“He’s dead now. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“You ain’t meanin’ what you say. Grief can cloud the mind.”
“If you want to say some words over him, go right ahead. But he was my father and he stays with me.” At a low trajectory, Tildy flung herself between the long-ago death and the one newly fetched up; Harlene’s floating blue doll-face, Lucien’s drawn mummy mask. She had only one offering to make. “When I blow this town, I won’t be coming back. And I’m not going to leave him behind.”
Tildy followed the ambulance into Ville Platte and completed arrangements for what Mr. LeBeau, the funeral director, referred to as “high temperature carbonization of the remains.” At the house that afternoon, she received a call from a real estate agent to whom it seemed Mr. LeBeau was in the habit of supplying information on new vacancies. He wanted to find out her asking price. Tildy said she would not object if he went ahead and got what he could for the place, and gave him her address and phone number in Florida.
Lucien came out of the oven the next morning and Tildy was on her way. Benny and the girls were waiting on her in Lydell, but she was pointed in another direction. They could all go hang. She was headed on home with her daddy riding beside her in a burnished canister of bronze.
5
STRAINED THROUGH LOW WOOLPACK clouds, sunlight was still intense. It penetrated the dusty windows of the house like a flashlight shined into a laundry hamper. The house was a squat bunker of lime green cinder blocks planted carelessly amid scrub. Tildy was seldom on time with the mortgage payments. From the rear, looking out the kitchen door across the parched yard to a chicken coop now serving insectiverous beasts as cabaña and snack bar, it was easy to believe the world was flat. The overwhelming suggestion was of landlocked terrain, of a desolate outback where old buckaroos went to die.
Gibsonton had been a winter home for circus and carny people since the 1920s when a cookhouse operator named Eddie LeMay pulled off the road one evening just as the sun was setting over the Alafia River. He liked what he saw. “This is it, honey,” he told his wife. “Get out the bedrolls.”
There wasn’t much there at the time: a few shacks, a path through sweetgums to the river, strangler figs growing over everything like flowering pythons. But joined by a handful of colleagues the following year, Eddie persuaded J. B. Gibson, a Tampa land speculator who owned the riverfront where they were squatting, to put in a drainage system and sell off a few lots. The next year a large family of Italian acrobats moved down, and a deaf old man with a pet elephant, and two contortionist sisters who’d once spent a long weekend with P. T Barnum at a spa in Red Bank, New Jersey.
Each year since, from late October to Thanksgiving, the folks have streamed into Gibsonton—pitchmen, palm readers, barkers, animal trainers, jointees, “human oddities”—to take up residence in their cottages and housetrailers until it’s time to go back on the road again in spring. The pace of life is languid, the atmosphere blasé. A man with a pair of miniature legs sprouting from his chest can walk down the street without drawing a second glance, and the town’s postmistress, now retired, weighs just over eight hundred pounds.
Karl Gables could smell his own breath, fumes from a derelict cheese works. He was woozy from fourteen hours of sleep and there was a throb in his stomach that fried pimento loaf on toast hadn’t been able to muffle. Wearing khaki slacks, rubber sandals and a painter’s hat, he sat cross-legged by the kitchen door and drank Bromo Seltzer. A soft breeze came through the screen, played over his face. It felt good. A day like today, he ought to walk down to the river and have a swim.
Karl stuck his head out the door and sniffed. Something warm and sweet, a little like vanilla extract. Uneasily, he wandered into the yard. Brown grass crunched under his feet. A rustling came from somewhere in the underbrush and Karl answered by stomping the ground. Sounds kind of hollow down there, he thought. His stomach puckered and a humming began in his ears, grew louder. The river was just too far.
He jumped back in and latched the door. Then he went to the living room and picked up the book he had passed out with last night, Dr. Herbert J. Wigmore’s Gemology for the Hobbyist.
STAR OF ESTE
While a relatively small stone, its alleged weight being a mere 25½ carats, the Star of Este is noted for its perfection of form and brilliant quality. It belonged to the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria. Subsequent to his assassination, presumably, it reverted to the Crown and was said to have been in the possession of Emperor Charles, who died in exile in 1922. The later history of this stone is unknown.
Tales of buried treasure had been circulating around Gibsonton for years—pirate booty, smugglers’ coves, sea chests crammed with gold or precious stones. Donut Willie, who was forever buttonholing people on the sidewalk, claimed that a few years back his mother had gone to fillet an amberjack and found a ruby the size of a golf ball in its belly. There were lots of stories. In lunch counters, around gas pumps, at the barber shop, old mugs told each other about the fortunes that were out there, the made life waiting for someone who dug in the right place.
Sometime in the late ’30s a sword swallower by the name of Stix Morgan, who had been forced into retirement by a chronic allergy that caused him to sneeze suddenly and without warning, was digging along a sandy rise behind the fish hatchery at Bullfrog Creek. The blade of his shovel struck something hard. Stix fell to his knees and began scooping with his hands, already visualizing himself in spats and a vested suit, tooling around Miami in a chauffeur-driven roadster and tossing silver dollars to pedestrians. Something black and round began to emerge from the sand. Its surface was pitted. Stix thought of the pirate coffers in storybook illustrations, the shape of their lids. But when he brought his lantern closer what he saw was a human skull with most of its teeth still in place. Quivering, bathed in cold sweat, he kept on diggin
g. Had he come upon the bones of some long-forgotten buccaneer? Some rapacious fiend who had fled Hispañola with a heavy purse, evading both enemies and history alike? The skeleton was finally excavated. Propped on its worm-eaten breastbone was a rusted metal disk marked with the points of the compass. Rabid with doubloon hunger, Boots grabbed at it without first noticing what it read. The compass needle fell to the ground between his feet.
With a shovel in his hand, Stix Morgan died six months later of a heart attack. He had been at it all night every night, digging up every last inch of that rise, discovering nothing more valuable than an old padlock for which an antique dealer gave him three dollars.
It was only a week or two after he and Tildy moved down to Gibsonton from Virginia, where they had passed the first year of their marriage in noise and trepidation, that Karl heard this story. He laughed until it hurt.
“What a loser, this guy,” he said to the barfly who’d told him. “Had it right there in his hand and let it slip.”
Not long afterward, in that very same bar, Karl would meet an individual known as Zeke the Freak and eventually become something of a story himself.
From a Cuban chambermaid in a Tampa hotel, Zeke had purchased an old “chart” divulging the location of a fortune in gold bullion. Some legendary rumrunner of Prohibition days had buried a whole shitload of ingots over on Bird Island, a barren lump only a few miles out across the bay. Karl and Zeke went partners on some tools and a small skiff with a six-horsepower Evinrude. Every couple of days they would chug over to the island and dig. Empty-handed after two weeks of this, they were only mildly discouraged. The chart, rather freely rendered on the back of a telegraph blank, was after all a bit vague.
Zeke advocated persistence. “One percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Guy invented the lightbulb said that.”