by Farris, John
Joe ducked his head. His mother said, "We're from New Orleans. How about a couple of cheeseburgers, that sound good, Joe? He wants a chocolate shake, would you bring it right away, and I'll have a Coke. Can I buy some aspirin here?"
"Sure thing. Up front where you pay. I always take the Goody's Headache Powder myself. In fact I'm gonna take me a couple soon as I get to the kitchen, my feet are sufferin' like sin. How do you want those burgers?"
After the waitress left their booth his mother got up, slowly.
"You stay put till I get back. I need to use the telephone too."
"Does your sips hurt?" he asked, studying her wan face.
"Not so bad. But all the driving's hard on my back."
When his milkshake came he drank it slowly, without a straw; the cool foam felt good on his parched lips. By the time he reached the bottom of the tulip-shaped glass the burgers were on the table, but his mother hadn't come back. He ate most of the potato chips on his plate, then started in on the cheeseburger, looking up every few seconds.
His mother was a long time returning. When she sat opposite Joe she had an expression he'd never seen before. Close to tears, defeated.
"Guess we won't be going to California," she muttered, opening a package of headache powder and stirring it into her tepid Coke. She glanced at Joe for a response. "Keg said—well, it doesn't matter. I'm just too hot for anybody right now. Shit, how did this happen to me?"
"Not supposed to say—"
"I know, bad word." She did the familiar pantomime. "We'll put it in the 'sorry' box and leave it for the garbage man."
She put her face in her hands, hiding from the sight of a newly devastated life. When she looked bleakly at him again Joe said, "Where're we going to go, then?"
"There's probably lots, of places he can't find me, so—"
"Who?"
His mother looked through him. "Or maybe he can. No. I can manage it. Make sure it's safe, then I—" She refocused. Her face squinched from grief for a few moments; then she smiled. "Ketchup on your chin, Joely-Moly." Without waiting for him to react, she dabbed a twist of paper napkin in her water glass and reached across the table to clean him. "You'll be all right," she said, speaking more to herself than to Joe. "Nothing's gonna hurt you." She nodded emphatically, seeming on the edge of her control again. "Nothing."
"Oh, is something wrong with your cheeseburger?" the waitress asked.
Joe's mother looked up. "No, I—my appetite's just gone away. Must be the heat."
"I sure can sympathize." She looked approvingly at Joe's plate. "You can put it away, Joe. How about a piece of homemade pie to top off that burger?"
His mother spoke up for him. "He likes cake."
"Me too. We got applesauce cake, chocolate layer cake—"
"He loves chocolate."
"You don't say! We must be distant cousins or something, right, handsome? I'm one of those, you know, chocoholics myself. One big piece of chocolate cake coming up. And I'll just take that cheeseburger off your bill, ma'am."
"Thank you." She smiled at the waitress. "People sure are friendly here. What's your name?"
"I'm Rhonda. Rhonda Pott. Would you believe, I'm still not used to saying 'Pott' instead of 'Waldrup'?"
"How long have you been married, Rhonda?"
The girl held up her diamond and the gold wedding band to show off the set. "Seven months. My husband's at Camp Pendleton and I was gonna go out there to be with him, but what happened, his regiment just got their orders, and it looks like they'll have to ship out to that country where LBJ's been sending all the troops lately. I'm scared to death, but mostly I try to look on the bright side and trust in the Lord"
"I had Joe when I was eighteen," his mother said, proudly he thought.
"Well, I envy you. Let me hurry up that chocolate cake for this starving fella."
"She talks a lot," Joe said, when Rhonda Pott had left them alone.
"I think she's a good soul. Lots of good people in the world, Joe," she said, upbeat, and he started to smile at her. Just as unexpectedly, her mood crashed. "How do I keep getting mixed up with the wrong kind?"
She looked intently at Joe, as if all the answers were there in his innocent blue eyes; then she smiled ruefully and gave a shrug. The smile was gone, replaced by a look of remorse as she bowed her head over joined hands. They had attended Mass at the cathedral in New Orleans on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday, and on such occasions he had observed her looking like this, eyes closed and prayerful, although his mother explained to him that they weren't Catholic.
"Do you know what?" she said, before she opened her eyes and looked up again. "There's lots of good stuff in the souvenir shop next door. Arrowheads and petrified wood."
"What's that?"
His mother lifted her head and fumbled with her purse. "Oh, it's wood so old that it's turned to stone, then they take it and polish it and make it pretty." She hesitated, then took a crumpled five-dollar bill from her purse.
"You know how much this is, don't you?" He stared at the five-dollar bill. "Uh-huh."
"How many dimes?" she said sternly. Joe chewed his lips and did the math on his fingers, showing her.
"That's right. Well, take it, but don't spend more than half on arrowheads or junk, just buy a little something to keep in your cigar box and remind you—"
Alarmingly, her throat constricted and she gasped softly, as if she was about to cry. Joe froze. The moment passed before he could ask her if it was the cyst again. She pushed the five dollars across the table in the booth and said, "Go ahead, take it."
The offer of the money was so attractive, it overpowered a pinching qualm. "Where're you going?"
"To see about the car."
"Can't I go too?"
"Oh, no, Joely, eat your cake and—then look at all the pretty arrowheads. I don't want you in that dirty garage. Your father worked in a garage. Did I ever tell you that?"
"No," Joe said, suspensefully mulling this new bit of information regarding his father and hoping for more. "Did he fix cars?"
"Trucks. Big trucks. He was good at it, too, but then he had an accident. I've never liked garages since. And the smell always gives me such a bad headache. Anyway, the car—"
She was standing. She leaned toward him to kiss his forehead. "Here comes your cake. I'll pay the check when I go out."
"Wait—" But his mother was already halfway to the door, walking quickly past Rhonda Pott. Joe was half-inclined to slip out of the booth and follow his mother, but Rhonda was in his way before he could decide. Maybe his mother just wanted to be left alone for a little while. Sometimes she was like that. He looked at the slice of cake as Rhonda set it in front of him. He was still hungry, so he dug in. Rhonda lingered.
"How's that for chocolate cake?"
"Um." He ate with a spoon in his right hand, the five dollars clenched in his left fist.
"I know it's good, the way it's disappearing. You don't make a mess of crumbs, like my little brother. How about another glass of milk? I guess your mom went and paid the check already. But we won't worry about that."
Joe finished his cake and half of the glass of milk, and needed to go to the bathroom bad.
Except for a large man in bib overalls whose wispy white beard reached as far as his bulging stomach, the men's room was empty. He smiled at Joe as Joe slipped into a vacant stall, then reached up to lock the louvered door behind him. His mother had told him not to talk to strangers in public bathrooms, and always to lock the stall door behind him.
He had to do number two, which took a little time, forcing out marble-size constipated balls. When he left the men's room he was attracted to the souvenir shop adjacent to the café and went in to wait for his mother. He had decided he wasn't going to spend any of the five dollars she'd given him, if his father had worked in a garage, maybe he still fixed cars. That, Joe reasoned, would make it easier to find him when Joe was old enough to go looking. And had more five-dollar bills, more than he could count on t
he fingers of both hands.
But there was a lot of attractive stuff in the souvenir shop. Feathered Indian headdresses, tom-toms with tightly stretched rawhide drumheads, and scaled-down but real-looking bows and arrows. Tomahawks were $1.50 each. One dime per finger, ten fingers made a dollar. Five more fingers, $1.50. He was tempted to buy one of the rubber tomahawks. His mother had a rule about shopping. There's lots of things to like; buy something you love. The question was, what did he love most, the red-and-orange tomahawk, or his father? He kept the five dollars in the button-down change pocket of his shorts.
After a while he became bored with walking up and down the aisles of the souvenir shop. He glanced often at the entrance, but his mother hadn't come back from the garage. The café was a lot less crowded, and he saw .Rhonda Pott standing around chatting with one of the other waitresses. "Pott" was a funny name for somebody. His mother called the toilet a "pot." Joe suppressed a giggle; then suddenly, not aware of any reason for it, he felt like crying. What was she doing at the garage for so long?
Outside the sun was lower in a blue-gray sky, but still intensely bright, a shock to his eyes. The hot gritty wind blew almost without letup across the gravel apron of the frame-and-shingle buildings by the highway. Tires whined on the blacktop as trucks sped by. Joe looked where the Studebaker coupe had been parked, then at the garage. He couldn't see from where he stood if his mother had pulled the car inside to be looked at. He trudged that way, his mouth drying up.
Before he reached the garage he saw his footlocker, sitting by itself next to a drink box on a concrete slab in front of the garage. They had bought it at an Army-Navy store on Poydras Street, and his mother had helped him letter his name on two sides with red fingernail polish. He could spell "Joe" easily enough, but his last name, which had a lot of letters, was very hard for him, both to spell and to pronounce. Also he had misspelled "Kep out." His clothes and all of his personal possessions were in the footlocker, which had been in the trunk of the Studebaker.
He ran into the garage.
There were two cars up on the lifts, mechanics in filthy overalls working underneath them. Neither car was a red-and-black Studebaker. He ran past a jackedup station wagon, fenders lacy with rust, glanced into an office cubicle beside which a big wall-mounted fan was roaring, and found himself at the open back door of the garage.
A tall man with bad posture and grease-smeared cheeks was having a smoke in the slant shadow of the overhanging corrugated metal roof. Beyond him there was nothing to see but treeless flinty ground, cool stripes of irrigated farmland in the hazy distance, then the jagged mountains of western Arizona.
"What're you looking for, kid?"
Terrified, Joe turned and ran back through the noisy, sweltering garage, out into the glare of sun. He hesitated, then ran toward the road, the glitter and growl of California-bound truck traffic.
"Hey!"
He was stopped at the edge of the highway by Rhonda Pott, who dragged him, writhing, back a few feet.
"Look out, Joe! Where're you going, there's been people killed trying to cross the highway here!"
Joe stopped fighting her. He breathed through his mouth, searing his throat and then his lungs.
"What's wrong, Joe? Where's your mom?"
His head jerked one way, then another, as he looked for her, for the missing car. He scarcely noticed the tall man who had been smoking behind the garage. The remainder of the cigarette was spit-pasted to his lower lip as he approached them.
He said to Rhonda, "There was a blond woman, maybe half hour ago, took that footlocker over there out of the trunk of a Studey and drove off. Never looked back."
"Oh, my God," Rhonda Pott said softly, and feltJoe slip from her loosened grasp.
She looked down and saw him lying faceup in the gravel, eyes rolled back in his sunstruck head, a little bloody froth on his lips. His arms and legs were thrashing uncontrollably.
"Oh, my God," she said again, kneeling to shade Joe from the light, to touch him consolingly, helpless to stop the brutal grinding of his tongue between his teeth.
The rolling motion of the sea near sunset; a gull crying on the wind.
He couldn't breathe through what was left of his nose. The air he dragged in through his mouth tasted of seawater and old blood. Not fresh blood. So he recognized that he was alive and probably not bleeding to death internally. It was all that he knew, or could remember. His predicament was a blank to him. Adrift, hurt—something had happened to him, to the Dragonfly. An accident?
The image of a woman recurred. Looking up from her book under an umbrella. Who? And where...
Dancing with pert lovelorn Yvonne on the terrace of her home. Some occasion or other. When?
He couldn't breathe, couldn't smell. Taste of salt, of blood. Too painful to drag in another breath. Broken bones. But the body wouldn't give up, not yet.
Slap and sting of a wave in his face. The wind rising, the boat pitching. Whose boat? His eyes closed, images of the mind no longer tinged redly by the sun on tight, glued-down lids.
The water moistened his matted eyelashes. He was able to open his eyes, slits, a second at most. Sky of pastel blue, washed with sunset pink. Clouding up.
Thunder, far off. Nothing wrong with his hearing, then. But he'd heard the gulls earlier, qif and on. So not completely at sea. In a channel between islands, or a Windward shipping lane rich with tramp-steamer garbage. The wind coming from—
He raised his head. The effort caused him to black out again. When he came to, perhaps only a few seconds later, he was shivering, in horrible pain. Hard to bear, but his pain was better than numbness, the profound trauma that calmed the spirit before death. His body was alive, wanting to survive.
The boat lifted, fell. A small wave broke over him.
This time when he sat up, hands clutching the gunwale for support, he remained conscious—groaning, then crying out as the pain cut him like a quick dull saw. He nearly strangled, trying to breathe without disturbing his broken ribs. His head lolled with the motion of the boat. He was nauseated, but he forced himself to open his eyes and try to appraise his situation.
The boat he was in appeared to be one of the beautifully crafted, always dependable Saintois fishing boats. There was a motor on the transom. And, on the horizon, he saw the mountains of an island large enough to be Basse-Terre or Dominica, its identity partly shrouded in storm and spidery lightning.
When he looked again at the bow, lightning revealed the face and breathtaking form of a woman seated there.
Her hands were clasped just above her smooth pudenda, hairless as marble, and she was posed, unadorned, with her face in three-quarter profile, as if she were having her portrait painted. Her brown hair, in soft full waves undisturbed by the wind, had russet highlights. Her exposed breasts were tipped with glancing flame like St. Elmo's fire. Her nakedness was chaste enough, but her cheekbones had a sensual tilt to them, and her eyes flashed according to the whim of her flame; shades of blue and holy god. She was familiar, but he couldn't place her. He might last have seen her within the halls of an elegantly archaic middle-European art museum, or acathedral. She was ghost, hallucination, a temperate angel. His heart was seized, roughly engaged, in a way he'd never felt. Her presence subdued his pain; humbly, he wanted her to love him.
Am I going to die? Joe said, or thought he said. Nothing else could explain this visitation on a dark sea, at a dark hour.
She smiled slightly, as if that were a foolish idea. Then her long fingers described arcs of atmospheric, spectral fire as she held out a hand to him.
Then I'm going to live. Why?
The question in his mind excited her flame; there was red in it, and in her eyes, and for a few moments he thought he'd made the wrong interpretation of who had been sent to him. But it was just a flash of spirit, a comment on his obtuseness, for which she forgave him with another mute arc of the .hand. He felt, without substantiation, that he was still all right with the angels. The reasons he would have
to fathom for himself, if he cared.
Chapter Seven
Beckham, Georgia, is a small place, the seat of a county slowly becoming urbanized as the metropolitan area of nearby Atlanta expands east along Interstate 20. There is a courthouse square favored by moviemakers looking for authentic small-town Southern atmosphere, a plain, four-room farmhouse with a rust-red tin roof that the Virgin Mary reportedly visits from time to time, a cherry blossom festival held in the early spring, light industry sufficient to hold down the unemployment rate, and a very expensive private hospital in a greatly expanded antebellum mansion on a hilltop, facing away from the loading docks of a Kroger and a Wal-Mart in the strip shopping center just off Exit 42 of the 1-20.
The hilltop acreage features so many large vintage magnolias, dogwood and longleaf Georgia pines that the southern-exposure veranda and lofty Doric columns of the original mansion, still locally known as Jasquith Hall in spite of its decade-old conversion into a hospital and outpatient clinic, are barely visible for much of the year from the interstate lanes a few hundred yards away.
McCarter Langford specializes in reconstructive and plastic surgery, from faces so severely damaged that anthropometric analysis is required, to routine tummy-tucks for the forty-something crowd that can afford the best. They also do ("for the sake of our immortal souls," one of the group's younger surgeons remarked to Joe) some charity work, specializing in the correction of horrendous birth defects in children.
Laddy Langford performed almost all of Joe's required surgeries, as soon as Joe arrived from the Caribbean after a week in the Pointe-à-Pitre hospital with his face clumsily wrapped in smelly bandages, running a high fever in spite of antibiotics.
"How bad?" Joe asked when the bandages came off and Langford had a chance to assess the damage. He could barely talk. He had been shot full of Dilaudid, but even the slight effort needed for articulate speech revived the pain.