Brent was beyond commenting, nodding, or even looking in the woman’s direction. She’d boarded in Phoenix. He’d said hello. In reply, she’d unrolled the immense panorama of her medical history, then had moved on to her husband—killed by doctors in 1981—then had switched to their Chihuahua, Pepe, whose string of sufferings exceeded Job’s, and now had begun on the first of four daughters. Brent felt as if he’d turned on a TV to the Disease Channel. He aimed his gaze into the night. A full moon stage-lit the desert and revealed a troupe of saguaro cactuses. They were strangely human, their thick arms gesturing, each in the midst of a silent soliloquy. To Brent they looked ancient and wise. He’d have believed it if one had spoken. He studied them, wondering what they would say, and fell asleep with his head against the window.
* * *
The bus had a half-hour layover in El Paso. He went into the station to stretch his legs and was stopped by the sight of a missing-child flier. He peered at the picture of the dark-haired girl and thought of Lea, permanently missing. He felt like an escaped criminal who’d come face to face with his own “Wanted” poster. He was a fraud, posing as an innocent traveler, no better than the thieves at the San Diego depot.
He strode out the station door and was nearly turned back by the blinding light and blazing heat. He stopped, squinted, then stepped into a shaded doorway to adjust, like a diver decompressing. A time and temperature sign read 109°. He looked around. He’d never been in Texas. He liked not only being somewhere new, but knowing that no one else he knew had any idea where he was at that moment. He’d disappeared, shaken off all pursuers. A few doors down, a sidewalk preacher was declaiming. He was tall and red-faced, his shirt Arctic white and his forehead raining perspiration. Even his Bible seemed to be sweating. His back was to Brent, who couldn’t make out his words. Then he turned.
“‘… A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth,’” he shouted out.
He felt the man’s tweezerlike eyes close upon him.
“That’s what the Lord God said to Cain!” He wiped his face with a handkerchief and turned. Brent quickly retreated into the station, the man’s words burning in his brain. Being a stranger in a strange land had suddenly lost its appeal.
* * *
The Corn Belt and Wheat Belt didn’t do the country justice. Brent passed through a dozen unmentioned zones marked by various firsts: first business using Geronimo’s name, first cowboy boots on a passenger, first appearance of catfish on a menu, first time being called “Sugar” by a waitress …
In East Texas the landscape’s green deepened and the air hung heavy with moisture. He changed buses in Houston, opened Emil’s cast-off copy of Two Years Before the Mast, and read all the way across Louisiana. He might almost have been reading his own life. Though the circumstances were different and the year was 1834, Richard Henry Dana had preceded him, setting out on a second existence of his own, leaving the lecture halls of Harvard for a life of travel as a working sailor. No more, Brent promised, would he complain about the bus after reading of the retching, fatigue, perennially wet clothes, and mortal dangers that the author endured. He forced himself to close the book, vowing to make it last.
The billboards announcing the Key Lime Pie Belt first appeared in Alabama, then proliferated across the Florida line. Brent got off in Tampa to transfer at 2:00 A.M., stiff-jointed and thirsty. He’d been riding for two days and nights. Though his ticket would take him all the way to Miami, the catalog of killings there recounted by the pair behind him had dimmed his desire for another big city. It was hot and muggy. He longed to go swimming. He consulted his map and decided to jump ship on Florida’s Gulf coast. He boarded the next local bus heading south and was the only passenger to get off in the small town of Beale Beach. The sky was still black. He smelled the water. Staggering down the deserted main street, he turned down a side road toward a beachfront motel and was informed by the drawling clerk that check-in began at 3:00 P.M. Brent sleepwalked out. He trudged up the beach, shucked his pack, and fell asleep on the sand.
A mosquito in his ear was his alarm clock. He jerked awake, glanced around, and was startled to find two people strolling past him and the tide risen just short of his sneakers. It was nearly noon. His face felt sunburned. He roused himself, moved back from the water, then viewed the minuscule waves in dismay. When he’d lived in Atlanta they’d come to Florida, to Palm Beach, on the Atlantic side, where the waves had been monstrous and the water bracing. He waded in now and wondered if the water was actually hotter than 98.6°. He felt slightly foolish standing in it, the waves rubbing against his ankles like a cat. He’d had no idea that Florida’s two coasts were so different. He considered catching the next bus out. Then he recalled a French woman in the San Diego hostel saying that the disappointments on her trip sometimes turned into her best experiences. Someone else at the dining room table had agreed. Brent didn’t really feel like getting back on the bus. He slapped a mosquito dead on his arm and hoped the woman was right.
He ate a long lunch in the Sand Dollar Cafe, treated himself to both pecan and Key lime pie, and felt better. He explored the town, walked out on the pier, noticed that he was in the Ma’am and Sir Belt, and was surprised to find himself using these when he presented himself at a motel. The woman at the desk eyed his pack with suspicion. He sensed her scanning a list of possibilities and checking off “drug smuggler,” “eco-terrorist,” and “atheist backpacker.” She asked to see his driver’s license. He had none, hoped she wouldn’t ask why, and produced the identity card he’d gotten in Chicago to take its place. He shamelessly loaded on the Ma’ams, then amazed himself by asking if there would be a Bible in his room. This gained him admittance to air-conditioning, a shower, a television, a telephone for ordering pizza, and a sagging bed.
He woke to the sound of his neighbor’s TV, which had blared ever since Brent had arrived. He turned on the radio to drown out the noise. The station it was set to was playing Dixieland. Brent had rarely bothered with jazz. It was unintelligible, a foreign language. He lay back and listened, tried to follow the trumpet’s line, then the clarinet’s, then began flipping through the whirligig book, came to the drawing of the marching band—and knew he’d found his next project.
He reached over to the night table for a bookmark. The piece of paper in his hand turned out to be a note from the maid. It read, “I hope your stay is a pleasant one. Trisha.”
She’d put a circle, not a dot, over the i in her name, suggesting someone young. He pondered the message, knew that it was really a disguised request for a tip, but felt like taking it at face value as a welcome from a new acquaintance. His second life was short on friendship. He contemplated possible replies:
“I really like what you’ve done with the room.”
“What’s it like to clean motel rooms all day?”
“I’m a seventeen-year-old SWM, handsome, independent…”
“I accidentally killed a girl. I just had to tell someone.”
In the end, he took the pad by the phone and wrote, “Dear Trisha: I appreciate your note. I’m completely alone.” He stared at the words. He hoped she wouldn’t take it as a come-on. He hadn’t thought about girls for a long time and had no desire to meet her. He liked the idea of a disembodied conversation. He felt he could tell her more that way. He anchored the notes with a pen before leaving.
At the Sand Dollar he ordered a shrimp omelet, tried Tabasco sauce for the first time, overdid it, drank all of his water, then set off up the beach with his pack. Though his room was air-conditioned, he’d decided not to work there. He didn’t want to face Trisha, didn’t want anyone to see his tools, and didn’t care to stay cooped up for three days listening to the laughter from his neighbor’s sitcoms. The day was overcast and cooler. He marched on, hoping to escape all observers lest word of his strange activity get back to the desk clerk. The palm trees on his right, he noticed, looked different from those in San Diego. The black-headed gulls crying overhead were new to him also. The beach was all but empt
y. Summer, he realized, was the off-season here.
He left the town proper and eventually came to a boarded-up ice cream shop set next to a glass-strewn parking lot. “Open” was painted in large letters on one wall, contradicting all evidence to the contrary. There was a chain across the cracked drive that led to the beachfront road. Beside the building were three initial-scarred picnic tables, once shielded from the sun by a metal framework that had lost nearly all of its fiberglass panels. He’d needed a table of some kind to work on. Now he needed shade. He looked around, then collected palm fronds, stood on one of the tables, and stretched to lay them across the metal bars, feeling as resourceful as Robinson Crusoe.
He drank one of the three cold sodas he’d brought and set to work. He heard an occasional car on the beachfront road, hidden by trees and a bluff. No one passed before him on the beach. It was almost too private a site, and slightly eerie. Looking up at the menu still posted on the wall, he felt like a misplaced customer, a Rip Van Winkle who’d awakened to find himself in a deserted world. When the wind kicked up and blew off half his fronds, the sky darkened, and a sudden deluge soaked him, he wondered if he was the storm’s only witness. He dragged his pack under the table, then sat down beside it.
The rain passed as quickly as it had come. He emerged feeling cooler, replaced the fronds, and returned to work. The whirligig featured a drummer, a trumpet player, a clarinetist, and a man with a trombone. It was a leap beyond the spouting whale, with more figures, a six-bladed propeller, and a much more complex system of rods and pivots that made the instruments dip and rise as if the musicians were marching. Brent wasn’t put off by the lengthy instructions and actually looked forward to a long project. What would he do with himself otherwise? The numbered steps were his manual for living, always telling him what to do next, his only guideposts in the wilderness. For the first time, he’d read them through closely, beginning to end, before starting in. This time, too, he managed to sidestep several of his earlier mistakes and no longer felt his tools contained mischievous spirits bent on thwarting him. He’d bought a new file in San Diego, a four-in-hand, with four different surfaces. He enjoyed its heft and admired its design. It came as a surprise to find himself harboring such feelings toward a tool.
He decided to make Lea the clarinetist, painstakingly sawed out the figure, then ate the sub he’d brought. He took a break and flopped in the water. Then he read from his star book’s first chapter, studying the four drawings of the earth in its circuit around the sun. The tilt of its axis caused the Arctic to receive sun all day and night in the summer illustration, while Antarctica stood in darkness. He reread the captions, then the text below, and for the first time comprehended why there were seasons. Winter and summer, the solstices and equinoxes, the change in where the sun rose and set all derived from the earth’s angled axis—and all suddenly made perfect sense. He pored over the illustrations, confirming and glorying in his understanding. Why hadn’t he learned this sort of useful information in school? He read on. He’d been reborn after the crash. He would give himself a new education, starting at the beginning.
He added more fronds to block the sun as it moved west, until there was no room to add more. The sun’s glare and his hunger finally drove him back. He packed up his things and walked through the water, halted by a score of strange shells on the way. The sight of fellow humans ahead was pleasing. He looked forward not only to the food but to the friendliness of the Sand Dollar. He stopped in his room first and took a shower so cold it seemed to turn his skin inside out. Then suddenly he remembered the notes. He shut off the water, walked out dripping, and snatched up the sole piece of paper on the table. The handwriting was slanted and unfamiliar.
“Trisha don’t work today. No one’s alone with Jesus.”
He felt slapped rather than comforted by the second sentence. He vowed not to reveal himself again, tossed the note into the trash, and got dressed, thinking back to church. Religion, as practiced by his parents, was a social rather than a spiritual affair, the choice of which Methodist church to attend very similar to the choice of what car to buy and be seen in. Neither the sermons nor the Bible had seemed to intersect with his own life. He had no singing voice, had lip-synched the hymns, and, despite the note’s claim, had felt conspicuously alone in church. He headed outside.
The Sand Dollar’s tippy, varnished wood tables were nearly all free. He took a seat over in the corner, his usual spot.
“How’s my little baby today?”
The words were called out by the grandmotherly waitress who’d served him at lunch the day before.
“Pretty good,” he replied, though no answer was required.
She fluttered over, a plump angel bearing water. “There you go, honey. You already know your order?”
To speak and be spoken to nourished him. He knew she called everyone “baby” and “honey” but enjoyed the illusion of his specialness. Her worried comments on his skinny looks inspired him to order the complete roast beef dinner. Other diners began to drift in. He recognized a few. He felt almost like a regular, outranking a couple who entered and asked for a menu, unaware it was painted on the wall. While waiting, he wrote a postcard to Emil, even though he wouldn’t be back in Germany to read it for another month. His food arrived. He read his star book while eating, glanced at the setting sun, then had an inspiration. He slid his chair back into the corner, sat up straight, felt his head bump the wall, and made a tiny mark with his pen on the sill where the sun first touched the horizon. Tomorrow he’d make sure to be there at sunset.
It was already stifling by the time he returned to his workplace the next morning. His fronds blocked the sun, his repellent turned back the mosquitoes, but there was no escape from humidity. Any exertion slicked his body with sweat. Luckily, he wasn’t swinging a sledgehammer but applying a speck of white paint to an eye, sanding a sharp corner, tapping in a brad. The musicians were only ten inches high. He lost himself in their miniature details and found the work meditative. There was no reason to rush.
A breeze blew in off the water after lunch. At the same time, in the opposite direction, a gaggle of children flew out of the palms up the beach and splashed into the water. Brent’s head jerked up. There were seven or eight of them, all black, all grammar-school-aged except for one older girl. They played in the water, threw sand, waded out. Then one of them spied him, called to the others, and led a noisy charge to investigate. Brent’s sanctuary suddenly squirmed with life.
“He got shade in here!”
“What you making?”
“Can I paint?”
“You need me to help?”
He began to explain what a whirligig was, then heard his harmonica being blown. While negotiating its safe release, he caught the rasping sound of his saw. He felt like a substitute kindergarten teacher. He finally took the harmonica and blew full-force to get everyone’s attention. Then he held up the illustration of the marching band whirligig in the book and let one of them blow on the finished propeller, sending it circling smoothly.
“Cool!”
“My uncle plays the harmonica.”
“I know how to saw.”
“Make me one!”
He wished he had some extra wood for them to play with, but he’d barely enough to finish this project. He had plenty of nails, though, and let one boy hammer some into a chunk of driftwood. At once there was a tussle over the hammer. He ended up forming a line and issuing five nails to everyone in it. He tried to remember where he was in his work.
“Where you from?” the older girl asked.
“Chicago,” Brent answered. He took up his pliers.
“Why you making that thing, anyway?”
He twisted a loop in the end of a rod. The outlandishness and mystery of his undertaking suddenly struck him afresh. His eyes lost their focus on his work. “Just for fun.” His voice held no conviction.
A boy peered at him point-blank. “Are you famous?”
Brent smiled. “Nope.
Not at all.” He looked around for his wire cutters. “You’re about the only ones in the world who know I make these.”
They drifted back to the water after a while, then vanished into the trees. Brent worked until late, turning his back to the sun when it sank below his palm fronds. Then he remembered that he had a date with it at the Sand Dollar. He arrived just in time, snagged his table, tuned out the young waitress’s recitation of specials, and watched the sun touch the water just to the left of his mark on the sill. He beamed. It had moved to the south. This made sense—it was July, past the summer solstice.
“Do you need a few minutes?” the waitress repeated.
“Yeah.”
He sensed she was baffled by his grinning.
Back at the motel, his neighbor’s TV was on. Brent pictured a skeleton still gripping the remote. Retreating to the beach, he pulled out his harmonica, played the six songs he’d memorized, then moved on to “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” It grew dark. He lay back, watched the stars emerge, greeted by name the constellations he knew, then took out a scrap of red cellophane. He’d begged it from a florist near the bus station in Mobile and now fitted it over his flashlight with a rubber band. His star book had said this would ease his eyes’ adjustment between light and darkness, handy when studying a star map at night. It seemed to help. He worked the southern sky, glancing between his book and the heavens, and added Scorpius to his list, with its poised, potent, sickle-shaped tail and the red star Antares at its heart. He finally closed his book and just gazed. He glimpsed a falling star in the west, like a match scratched against the sky, then returned to his room and rationed out three chapters of Two Years Before the Mast before going to sleep.
The children didn’t appear the next day. The following day, four of them returned. He took a break, went swimming with them, and learned from a little boy that the ridged, orange shells were called lion’s paws and that the birds diving into the water were terns. He didn’t mind apprenticing himself to a third-grader. In gratitude, he let the boy drill holes in a long finger of plywood.
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