Fever Tree

by Tim Applegate

  Just think about it, hon. While Hunter’s in school we can cruise out to one of the nearby islands for a picnic, or swim in the ocean, or just chill out on our own lanai. We can learn how to cook Mex, maybe grow some of those hot peppers you like so much. And on weekends we can drive down the coast and check out the cliff divers at Acapulco, wouldn’t Hunter love that? Best of all, we won’t have to work another stinking day for the rest of our lives. No more Winn Dixies, no more drug runs, no more Teddy Mink. Colt smiled in the dark, convinced that at long last his ship was about to come in and that Maggie Paterson would be standing on its bow waiting for him. Moonlight swims, margaritas on the beach, hot sex beneath the palm trees of Old Mexico; how could any woman in her right mind say no to all that?

  Three

  21

  The day after Consuela disclosed the startling news that the true identity of the Gibson’s most intriguing guest had at last been revealed—that William Dieter was, in fact, a novelist of some note—Mr. Gold phoned a former schoolmate, the retired English professor Wilbur Meeks, to inquire whether his old friend had ever heard of the young writer, or possibly read his book.

  Both, Meeks replied. Heard of him and read his book.

  Which I understand—and correct me if I’m wrong, Wilbur—is held in high esteem by any number of critics?

  Oh yes, Meeks confirmed, by critics and readers alike. It’s quite a success, particularly for a first novel.

  When Meeks asked Mr. Gold if he planned to read William Dieter’s book, the manager admitted that the thought had, indeed, crossed his mind.

  After a pause, the professor returned to the line, carefully choosing his words, as if he were about to broach a particularly delicate subject. I must tell you, Henry, that I’m a bit surprised at your interest in this particular . . . work.

  But why, Wilbur, why surprised?

  Meeks took more time to consider his response, determined to remain diplomatic. Because Jaguar Moon, he finally said, is a rather, well, graphic novel, sexually speaking that is. If you’ll forgive my saying so, it just doesn’t seem like your usual cup of tea.

  Mr. Gold, who had previously confessed to professor Meeks that his idea of a good read was one of the swashbuckling tales of Mr. Alexander Dumas, did not take offense. When it came to matters of literary taste he was more than happy to defer to his learned friend. After all, Mr. Gold would later inform Consuela, a man does not gain tenure for twenty years at a prestigious state university without sterling—no, make that impeccable—credentials in his chosen field. Besides, the revelation that William Dieter was a modernist saved Mr. Gold the invaluable chunk of time he would have wasted slogging through Jaguar Moon. Because a man like me, he assured professor Meeks, gives little credence to these brash young Turks apparently intent on proving that decorum within the pages of a book is obsolete. Not that he had, mind you, ever actually read one of their books.

  An amused Wilbur Meeks assured his old friend that he understood his position.

  As you will no doubt recall, Wilbur, I was a happily married man for thirty five years. Right up until the day my dear Virginia, rest her soul, passed like an angel into the arms of the Lord. So I hardly need someone like young Mr. Dieter to describe, ad infinitum I suspect, the physical act of love. Some things, I dare say, are better left to the imagination!

  Professor Meeks, who was thinking well there goes D.H. Lawrence, nonetheless reiterated his sympathy for Mr. Gold’s opinion.

  Thank you, sir. And now that we have that particular issue out of the way, may I let you in on a little secret?

  Of course, Henry. Over the years Meeks had been privy to any number of Mr. Gold’s “little secrets” and often found them pleasantly diverting.

  To tell you the truth, Wilbur, the only reason I was even remotely interested in Jaguar Moon is because the author happens to be staying with us here at the Gibson.

  You’re kidding?

  Oh no, I’m not. For the last four weeks Mr. William Dieter has been residing right here in our humble abode. And I must say that over that period of time I have grown quite fond of the young man, quite fond.

  Another pause, then Wilbur Meeks came back on the line, his voice subdued now. Such a tragic story.

  Jaguar Moon?

  No no, the real story, William Dieter’s story.

  When Mr. Gold confessed that he didn’t know what his friend was talking about, Professor Meeks proceeded to fill him in on certain biographical details he had culled from a recent article in Esquire. How Dieter had met the love of his life, a young woman named Jennifer Rawls, down in the backwater Mexican village where he was writing his book. How upon completion of that book he had returned with Jennifer to his hometown in Indiana, where they were promptly married. And finally how those two admirable young lovers discovered, in this troubled old world of ours, both romance and success. For upon its publication Jaguar Moon was greeted by immediate and unqualified critical acclaim, a rarity for first novels.

  And then a few months later, Meeks continued, everything fell apart. Mr. Gold closed his eyes, unwilling to visualize the scene his old friend was about to describe to him, and yet unable not to. Unable to not see the fierce rain pounding the highway, Dieter’s bride driving home from her job at the university library, a car traveling in the opposite direction sliding across the center line and slamming into her Volkswagen head-on. Tragically, Meeks concluded in a near-whisper, Jennifer Rawls had been instantly killed.

  So now you see, Mr. Gold explained to a clearly distraught Consuela that very same evening, why poor Mr. Dieter has chosen to flee his hometown and resettle, for the time being, right here. And why he is so reticent about his personal circumstances. It is, no doubt, simply too painful to talk about, too painful to even think about.

  When she began to sob, Mr. Gold wrapped an arm around the housekeeper’s quivering shoulders and urged her to remain strong. She must pray for Mr. Dieter. They both must. So that one fine day, he concluded with sudden fervor, that estimable young man will pull himself up by the bootstraps and trod down the tenuous path to worldly happiness once again.

  But Consuela was inconsolable, and that night she couldn’t sleep. Her heart bled for the tragic writer, and her frustration soared. She racked her brains for some way to ease Dieter’s pain, knowing that the best method to accomplish that little feat was through the healing power of love (or as the crude habitués of her neighborhood tavern liked to call it, a pity fuck), which was no longer a possibility now that Maggie Paterson had, without warning, burst upon the scene. Consuela wanted to take Mr. Gold’s advice and be Christian about the entire matter but it was impossible not to imagine what would have happened if Maggie Paterson had minded her own business and stayed the hell away. Because I was here first, damnit, and if it wasn’t for that redheaded hussy it would be me, not her, whose shoulder Dieter would be crying on right now!

  As the sleepless hours ticked away into the blush of dawn, the housekeeper reviewed, over and over, her squalid romantic past. It was a train wreck: three ne’er-do-well husbands—one loser after another—and now Dieter, the man of her dreams, so near and yet so far away, in the clutches of a femme fatale. She locked a pillow between her legs and groaned, mourning her wretched fate, yet determined to remain vigilant just in case the torrid affair between the writer and the redhead eventually foundered on the jagged rocks of its own spontaneity, as affairs of that sort—rebounds—tended to do.

  22

  It might have been the change in the weather, the breeze that whistled off the harbor and tempered the blistering heat reminding him of the wind that sang in the cornfields once, under autumn’s gibbous moon. Or it might have been something less tangible, a voice in a dream urging him to reconsider the merit of his decision to leave. Whatever the reason, one fall-like morning Dieter woke in his bed in Room 24 positively homesick, missing, in particular, his dad.

  As morning light
poured through the room’s open window he saw his father in the workshop sharpening his chisels, clamping a drawer front, mixing stains, a vision intimate and comforting until he noticed how tired and haggard the cabinet maker looked; then Dieter’s soul ached, for he knew it was the son’s absence that exacerbated the older man’s sorrow, deepening his loss. He watched his father glance out the shop window at a wave of dark clouds curling over the hills of southern Indiana. In the garden, pumpkins lay scattered like beach balls next to a mound of winter squash, tomato vines clung to their trellis, a red wheelbarrow leaned against the door of its shed. And yet none of these familiar sights, Dieter suspected, infused in his father the sense of belonging he used to cherish, the understandable pride of a man who had come to Indiana with next to nothing to create a way of life that promised fulfillment but now seemed fleeting, insubstantial, nearly worthless. The land he once considered paradise huddled like a penitent beneath the brooding shadows of those clouds. Soon the cold rains would fall before freezing into snow, powdering the blue hills. Black ice, winter light, fear of aging. Mornings he would tramp out to the workshop as he always had but there would be no pleasure in it now, only duty; the son still absent, the daughter-in-law still dead.

  Dieter squeezed a quarter into the payphone in front of the Gibson, asked the operator to reverse the charges, and waited for his father to answer the call.

  I’m fine, Dad, just fine. Yes on both counts, he answered; he was eating well and exercising, too.

  He described his morning walks down to the harbor and the afternoon swims off Christopher Key. In answer to the next question, he confirmed that he was still refinishing furniture two days a week in Frank Paterson’s store, and when the line went silent, the son knew that the father was pondering once again why the boy was toiling for a stranger when he could be working right there, where he belonged.

  What about money? Do you need any money?

  No, Dad, I’m good. His agent had just wired him a thousand dollars to hold him over, he said. And there was plenty more where that came from. Not to worry, there was going to be more.

  Another uncomfortable silence while Dieter waited for his father to voice, not for the first time, his doubts. Although he was justly proud of his son’s success, it was difficult for the cabinet maker to understand the market forces that determined the worth of a book. A cabinet maker submitted a bid, and if the contract was awarded he calculated what the profit from the job would purchase (a new lawn mower, carpeting for the spare bedroom), or pay off (the equity line, the Home Depot bill). The market for a novel, on the other hand, was amorphous, unpredictable, impossible to pin down even when Dieter once again explained, with admirable patience, the equation. For every copy that sells, he said, I make a percentage. And the book is still selling, as you know, quite well. In addition, there had been an inquiry from one of the movie studios, some interest in a possible script.

  But to the cabinet maker it all sounded, in the end, rather vague. He didn’t trust easy money.

  This agent of yours, he gets a percentage too, right?

  Yes, Dad. It’s how he makes a living.

  Dieter wanted to tell him that he had woken up homesick today but admitting his own sadness would only fuel the older man’s remorse, so he held his tongue. Because the father, like the son, suffered Jen daily, hourly, remembering every minute he’d spent with her in their short time. Escorting her down the trail behind the house that led back to the pond where Dieter used to fish when he was a boy, or dusting off the old family albums to point out the stern faces of his forebears, their Germanic austerity. Dieter clutched the phone, his mood darkening, his knuckles turning white. Six months had already passed but to the father, no less than the son, Jennifer’s death remained untenable.

  He hung up, slid another quarter into the metal slot, and dialed Laurie.

  Her name?

  Her name, Dieter. What is the woman’s name?

  Maggie. Maggie Paterson.

  Laurie sighed. Fine. Now tell me how you met.

  For the first time that day, thinking about Maggie, Dieter felt his homesickness loosen, slightly, its grip.

  She saw me skinny dipping.

  What?

  Skinny dipping.

  Where?

  In her pond.

  In her what?

  In her pond! She has a pond!

  I bet she does.

  Careful now.

  Well what the hell were you doing there? And why were you skinny dipping?

  Because I was hot, he said flatly.

  You were hot?

  Um . . . duh. I’m in Florida?

  Uh-huh.

  Besides, I didn’t know anyone was watching.

  How romantic.

  You’d have to ask her.

  What he didn’t tell Laurie was that his compulsion to possess—no, to consume—Maggie Paterson reminded him, worrisomely, of Erik Fuller, his fictional double in Jaguar Moon. Like Dieter during his time in Quintana Roo, Erik Fuller considered compromise an unworthy option, the path a sissy would choose. If you saw something you wanted, you took it. So when Fuller drank he drank, until the edges of the world blurred and the dark sand he trod home on turned gold in the light of the moon. When he swam he swam, until the muscles in his arms burned from exhaustion and his heart felt like it was going to explode. And when he made love he was so intense he often scared women away. In the kitchen of the hotel where he had labored during the day, Dieter tore chickens open with his bare hands and watched their blood pool on the stainless steel counter. Later, at the Yucatan Café, he picked up hippie strays—there were more than you could count—and took them back to his room on the outskirts of the village. Where in bed he turned into Erik Fuller, swordsman extraordinaire, whose bouts of lovemaking were nothing more than contests, conquests, a scorecard. In the morning the strays left early, pale as ghosts, with little to say. Nights of lust but nothing more, nothing deeper, nothing you could hang an actual emotion on. Until he met Jen.

  He saw the look of surprise on Maggie’s face the first time they made love and he wondered if it was fear. The second time he forced himself to slow down by imagining a ship negotiating a channel’s narrow waters, reversing thrust, and afterwards Maggie’s quiet contentment mirrored, briefly, his own. Despite his misgivings, tenderness, it seemed, was still possible. And yet minutes later, in the afterglow, he became agitated again. Why was he dragging poor Maggie into the maelstrom of his life? What right did he have to do that? In the old country, in his grandfather’s country, a widower wouldn’t have given another woman a second thought until a year had passed. And he wouldn’t have run away, either. He would have trudged down to his workshop in the cold morning light to bend his body to humble labor, to repair a clock or mend a barrel or fashion, out of staves of black walnut, rifle stocks; to compose the opening passage of an aria or ink, across a sheet of parchment, the words Chapter One. What he wouldn’t have done is fall into the arms of the first woman who hinted her possible interest. His hands trembled as they slid down Maggie’s smooth flanks. To assuage his guilt, he tried to hide in her crevices, he tried to drown.

  Come home, Dieter, his sister cried. That was an option, all right, but so was drowning, though he didn’t tell Laurie that.

  Bring her with you.

  Drowning was an option and so was alcohol, or scag. The thought of getting high kindled a sudden thirst, a desire as elemental as breathing. He thought about the bureau in his room in Quintana Roo, before Jen: the bag of white powder, little silver spoon, pillboxes. There were tabs of mescaline Parrish brought back from Tampico, and bottles of bootleg gin. At dusk, Dieter would lie in a hammock on the beach or straddle a barstool at the Yucatan Café and watch the sun plunge into the water as various chemicals dissolved in his bloodstream, offering satiation. Getting high solved, among other issues, the question of why he wasn’t as happy as he tho
ught he should be down here among the expats. So he lit a hash pipe or swallowed a tab of acid or lifted a spoon to his nose and waited for the world to make sense again. And when the drug took hold he lay back in his hammock—painless now—to listen to a faint lisp of surf or later, on his stereo, a song by Fever Tree, that solemn flute.

  He hung up the phone and crossed the street and strode into the Blue Moon with a new sense of purpose. Gene, who was wiping down the bar with a rag more soiled than whatever it was trying to absorb, shot Dieter a look, surprised to see an afternoon drinker, a happy hour type, so early in the day.

  What’s the haps, D?

  Dieter scoped the room, pleased to find it empty. What he needed to do required a certain amount of privacy. He nodded at the coffeepot Gene was holding in his hand and waited for the bartender to pour each of them a cup. Then, before Gene even had a chance to set the coffeepot back down, he blurted out the question he had assumed, not so long ago, he would never ask again.

  I don’t know, man. Gene shook his head, apparently disappointed, as if the unexpected request had revealed a moral crack in Dieter’s character. The bartender cradled his steaming cup in two hands and stared dully out the front door he had propped open that morning to let a little air in, a little light. And all of a sudden Dieter realized his mistake, his false assumption.

  Look, Gene, I’m sorry I put you on the spot like this. I shouldn’t have asked.