by Farris, John
Thomason said, "I was long interest-rate futures the day they changed the furniture in the Oval Office. I haven't suffered any regrets, either."
"In our business the really fine things always sell, of course. It may take a little longer. But the import duties we must pay now... and the sales-tax bite is discouraging to the small-business person like myself." Rembarto steepled his fingers as if he were considering a devout petition. "Perhaps we can look forward to some relief from the recently applied surtaxes when you become governor."
"My advisors and I are working on a completely new revenue plan that will make our state the envy of the other forty-nine. Or is Puerto Rico a state now? That would give us fifty-one, wouldn't it?"
"You know, I'm not sure about Puerto Rico. Well, you certainly can count on the King Street Merchants' Association for their endorsement, Governor."
Homeward bound to the Barony on U.S. 17 north, Thomason anticipated the billboards he'd be seeing in a few months along this very route, with his likeness on them. A two-day visit to Columbia had been highly profitable in terms of the support he'd picked up from, among others, the long-entrenched Speaker of the House, Pierce Foisby, and Luke's second cousin on his daddy's side from Gaffney, who was their party's newly elected chairman. It was a tight little community up there in the North, as Low Country people thought of the state capital, an interlocking directorate of lawyer/politicians, businessmen/politicians, banker/politicians, and the old-money squires whose opinions and desires were more important than a cemetery full of repeat voters. . . although the old way of doing things, except in the more backward rural hegemonies high and Low, was riskier in an age when all candidates for office were obliged to wield a double-edged sword called the Media.
His own use of the only two newspapers in the state that mattered and the local television stations had been, to date, selective and beneficial, thanks to the guidance of his press secretary and the PR firm she'd hired a year ago to make him a presence, on his way to becoming a force. Five years as a state representative gave him a beginner's luster; his failed run for Secretary of State had largely been forgotten. He'd put in his time as a local party hack and delegate to the national conventions, necessary for interior strength and useful contacts. He was, like so many other prominent South Carolina men, a graduate of the Citadel. Although he hadn't been in general practice for twelve years, he was a physician, which added to his stature. And he was currently married to a former Miss South Carolina and second runner-up in Atlantic City a dozen years ago. Chrlene had maintained her looks and she knew how to deliver a winning sound bite. She would be a source of strength, as long as he kept her in line.
Thinking about Charlene depressed him slightly, but a letdown was inevitable after all the energy he'd expended over the last couple of days. What he needed was a bourbon-and-branch and a good horse under him for a long run up the beach at twilight.
By the time he got home, the work crew clearing land for his new polo field—a recently acquired passion his political handlers frowned upon but hadn't actively condemned as being elitist—were calling it a day. He stopped to chat with a tired, sweaty Walter Lee, and asked him to call the stables to have Diacono sad-died and ready when he got there.
"All right, Dr. Luke."
"The crate back there has to be handled real careful, Walter Lee. It's a five-thousand-dollar table. Have Aldous and another boy see to it."
"Yes, sir."
He parked on the motor court beside the restored Cadillac he drove locally and the caterers' trucks. He'd momentarily forgotten about the barbecue they had on for tonight. In the house, one of the day girls was running a vacuum cleaner, the sound of which gave him an instant headache. Tired now after the long drive, he trudged up the stairs to his second-floor bedroom.
He was pulling off his boots when he heard Charlene. Her room was separated from his by the bath, but she hadn't closed her door all the way. He sat in his rocking chair holding the boot, listening. Then he took off the other boot, breathed deeply, got up and went into their shared bathroom.
Charlene was entertaining someone. He had a good idea who, without glancing through the crack in the doorway to verify his guess.
Thomason ran cold water in one of a set of sculpted gold-and-onyx washbasins, soaking a bath towel for twenty seconds. There was a paperback open on Charlene's crowded side of the sink top, one of those pseudo-fact books about encounters with space aliens. She read them religiously. Such input seemed part of the paranoia of the half-educated, those credulous people who could not accept life as a random walk, subject to human failure and the follies of nature.
"Oh, God, oh, God," Charlene raved, and her satiny old gilt bed rocked.
Thomason wrung out the towel and carried it, lightly twisted, into Charlene's bedroom, looked gloomily at the soles of her bare feet locked on either side of Norse's trim waist, and at Norse's bare taut heaving ass, as suntanned as the rest of him.
Charlene let rip with a string of passionate obscenities that inspired Norse to ever more frantic effort. He was a fucker, not a lover, Thomason observed. A pile-driving asshole. Neither one of them had any notion of his presence.
Thomason grinned and twirled his wet cold towel, remembering the old locker-room hijinks when he was a student at McCallie Prep in Chattanooga. Then he reached back and slashed the tip of the towel at Norse's clenched buttocks just as he was pumping.
Norse let out a scream that was somewhere between real pain and the ecstasy of release. He collapsed on Charlene, grabbing for the spot where the towel had bitten him like a horsefly. He saw Thomason standing at the foot of the bed. Charlene's eyes were still closed; white tooth gleam showed against her underlip. She was groveling and panting like a run-over dog.
Norse sat up suddenly, clutching his parts in both hands as if he were afraid for their safety. Thomason had fleeting thoughts along those lines—his straight razor was open and in plain sight twenty feet away in the bathroom—but he didn't pursue the notion. He only castrated horses, not pigs.
"I realize it's a hell of an inconvenience, Norse, but I'd like to talk to my wife. Get lost, will you?"
Norse crabbed his way off the bed. Charlene groaned, not opening her eyes.
"Luke, how could you?"
"Try locking your door when you're in rut." To Norse he said, "Don't put your clothes on in here. Do it in the hail outside."
Norse swallowed hard, gathering up his things from where they lay strewn on an ottoman.
"And don't dribble on the carpet, it cost more than the annual budget of the country that's well rid of you."
"Give me a break," Charlene said, covering her eyes with a languid hand but not bothering to pull a sheetover herself. She sniffed a couple of times. Her nose was running.
Thomason didn't look at her. He knew what the sniffing meant.
"Norse, if you bring any more coke in this house for my wife to pound up her nose, I'll stake you out on my new polo field and practice on-goal shots with your balls. You're not getting out of this room fast enough, goddammit!"
Four seconds later the hail door closed behind Norse. Thomason sat down on the bed.
"Charlene, you know what the three stages of a failed marriage are? Stage one is separate bedrooms, stage two is 'He's fucking my wife,' and stage three is 'I've got to get a new wife.'"
"So we're at stage two," she said. "We've been there practically forever."
"I sure God didn't get the pick of the litter when I married you, did I, Charlene?"
She struggled upright, her humid breasts swaying, ran the back of one wrist under her nose and said coaxingly, "Could you fix us both a drink?"
"I mean this very sincerely. No more coke. I'll ship you off to Hobjoy Hill again, I swear to Jesus."
"I don't need to be in detox! Besides, what would that do to your chances if it got out I was there?"
"Seeing you fall apart on a campaign junket would be a hell of a lot worse for my political future."
"I'm n
ot going to fall apart! I haven't been doing much, and that's the honest truth. What you don't understand is, I got a little depressed today." Bedding wadded beneath her, she fondled her slummy cunt with a catch in her breath, looking unsatisfied. "You got turned on watching, I bet. Do you want me now?"
"Yes," he admitted, treated to a glissando of erotic expectation. "Take a shower first, and take a bottle of that Summer's Eve in there with you, I don't much care for sloppy seconds."
"But pour me a drink. Please." She leaned toward him for a kiss. He turned his face aside.
"You don't have to do that," Charlene said, her feelings hurt. "I never let anybody else kiss me on the mouth. That's a rule I have."
"It's a whore's rule."
She kicked him, not really in earnest. "Grab any ass I know while you were gone?"
Thomason got up from the bed, walked to the windows and threw the drapes open, blanching in the sudden light. When he could see again he noticed Abby in the garden, with someone he wasn't familiar with. They were going down a path toward the bay. He watched them for a minute, until the angry pulse in his throat had subsided. Then he went into his bedroom, opened the bar, poured Blackjack over ice for two and carried the glasses into the bathroom.
Charlene was in the Jacuzzi shower, a fancy affair with nozzles that attacked the body from a dozen angles. He'd never been partial to it, preferring a lazy warm downpour. She was sitting, outside the crosshatching jets of water, and he thought from the way her downcast face was set that she was crying. But it was hard to tell with the water gushing every which way. Her blond hair was tucked into a bouffant shower hat like those that children wore to bed in illustrations of eighteenth-century country life. Her face was a perfect oval beneath the cap, innocent of makeup. It occurred to him that women always seemed more defenselessly naked when wearing only a shower cap. Her shoulders were turned in; her previously rosy breasts with their agitated nipples were virgin-pale again. As if her sins were washing away.
"Who's that with Abby?"
When she didn't answer he opened the shower door and stepped inside, clothes and all. Charlene raised her head, sullen eyes dripping.
"I SAID, SOMEBODYS WITH ABBY! I'd like to know who he is."
She blinked; she was unable to track his behavior with any accuracy today, and her fingertips were nervous on the tops of her sleek thighs.
"Must be that doctor. Name is Bryan—Bryce—I was supposed to have lunch with them, but I— He is some kind of good-looking, don't you think?"
"Doctor? Where did he come from?"
"I don't know. Pamela might have called him. You know how she's been lately. Maybe your adoring niece doesn't trust you as much as you—"
He had her by the throat before she could finish. Both hands. For a dreadful instant he thought of crushing her larynx so that he would never have to hear her speak to him in that tone again. Her eyes popped lividly in terror. He turned around and dialed the shower to ice-cold while still holding her immobile with one hand. When the riveting slash of cold water penetrated to the molten heart of him and turned it to slag, he found a reasonably dispassionate voice.
"Never, never say a thing like that to me again! Abby owes everything to me—and she's grateful. If you think spending your life in a wheelchair is bad, it could be worse for you, Charlene. Much worse."
Chapter Fifteen
With a note of apology in his voice, Joe said to Pamela Abelard, "I suppose I'm not making much sense to you."
She looked up at him. They were moving slowly along a breastwork that was roughly paved with tabby, a rocklike composition of ground oyster shell, lime and sand, twelve feet above the tidal swell of Pandora's Bay. She had pinned her hair up before leaving the house and wore Revos to shield her eyes from the lowering sun they faced in a still-cloudless sky.
"I'd be afraid, if I were you."
"I didn't say I wasn't. There's no protection for us in most of those countries, although the UN makes an effort. But when wretched conditions and tribal antagonisms at the government level reach a flash point, the result is wholesale, indiscriminate slaughter. There are at least a half-dozen Central African republics that are little more than huge running sores. Starvation, disease… a journalist I respect said this about African self-determination: 'How quickly ideals in the wrong hands become oppression, heartbreak and murder.' We worked for nine months out of a clinic cobbled together from a couple of abandoned Romanian buses. There were days when we saw a thousand patients. Four doctors, three nurses. You pretty much work in a fog of exhaustion."
"And you can't wait to get back."
"I need to catch up on what's been happening in my speciality. Fortunately I have some flexible and understanding partners at home."
"And an understanding girlfriend?"
"She was going to wait, when I volunteered the first time. I said I'd be gone a year. It stretched into two. She wrote me that she was marrying an oral surgeon in Winnetka." Joe looked appropriately regretful. "I guess I still owe them a wedding present. What are these, cannons?"
They paused next to a corroded old Columbiad, one of several still patiently aimed across the channel after more than a hundred and thirty years.
"This was called Grayson's Battery," Abby said. "The Union Navy came down the coast, bombarded the saltworks along the Atlantic, then sailed up the bay to make life miserable for the planters on both sides. Itwas a much more ambitious battery once—a dozen earthworks, forty ten-inch cannons. Slaves built the battery, but when Sherman got close to the sea all of our boys were pulled Out of Grayson's in a last attempt to stop him. Not one shot was ever fired from Grayson's Battery."
"'Our boys,' Miss Abby?" Joe said teasingly.
"I told you. The stork may have been late and dumped me in the wrong century, but I am a true daughter of the Confederacy. 'Gray falcon fell in the northern weather/vengeance was exacted beyond any taint of mercy/and the Belle Epoque of Carolina swoons/to a colloquy of gruff bassoons/that soothes the qualms of evening.' I write poetry too, Dr. Joe. Hey, let's break out that shaker of martinis now, and some of the hickory-smoked cheese? We don't eat for real until about eight-thirty."
"You hardly touched your lunch."
"Oh, I had a stiff headache, but I'm better now."
Joe opened the hamper he'd been carrying, spread a large checkerboard napkin in Abby's lap, shook the martinis in the silver thermos, poured for both of them into crystal glasses.
"Ummm," she said, tasting. "This is living."
He used the hinged top of the hamper for a cutting board, sliced cheese wedges and opened a box of herb-flavored crackers.
"What would it cost, Joe, to build a really decent clinic in one of those countries?"
"Why bother? We couldn't defend it against the thieves and drug addicts. It would be a ruin in a matter of months."
"But you maintained a clinic—"
"It didn't look like much. It blended with a generally devastated landscape. Shacks and rusty hulks."
"Oh." She looked across the bay at a flight of egrets, rising like a tidal wave above the shoreline cypress of an island wildlife preserve. "I guess that's one of the major frustrations. You're there to help, but they destroy what will most benefit them."
"Mobile clinics work, usually. Like the buses we scrounged. But we couldn't keep them running. No parts available."
"I can't imagine what it's really like. Do you have any photos with you?"
"No. I mailed photos and my diary to my sister when I had the feeling civil war was close."
"I'd like to read the diary of Joe Bryce."
"All doctors have terrible handwriting, didn't you know that?"
"The only doctor I've had much to do with is Luke." She reached up slowly and massaged her forehead.
"Too much sun?"
"No, I worship the sun. I don't know, I just haven't been feeling all that great."
"For instance?"
"Oh, headaches. And…"
She took another swallow o
f her martini.
"Dr. Luke says it's this stuff, but I swear to you I'm no boozer. I like a couple of cocktails during the day. Maybe wine with dinner. I don't drink at all after eight-thirty or so, because I have to work."
She sipped again, handed the glass to Joe, then turned the wheelchair to face east and took off her sunglasses.
"Joe."
"Yes?"
"I was spacey this morning, wasn't I? In the workshop."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I—did a fade. I was there, but I couldn't—say anything. As if the paralysis went to parts of my brain. When it happens I drift way, way off. The strangest feeling. I see myself sitting there in Rolling Thunder, but it's as if I—I'm dead. Then, when I come out of it, I don't remember what's going on, what we've been talking about. Scares me."
She turned again in the wheelchair, eyes narrowing.
"You're a doctor. What do you think is wrong?"
"I—it's difficult to say. I'd need a history, and—"
"Do you think you could help me?"
"I'm not a neurologist, Abby. I think you need—"
"I need you. Because, Joe—let you in on my little secret. As soon as I saw you by the pool this morning, I knew that my life was about to change, that something wonderful was going to happen to me. Then there was the dragonfly! That's not just coincidence, my friend."
He was looking at her, trying to think of an amiable protest, to back away from her conviction, when they both heard the horseman coming through the woods below the breastworks.
"It's Luke," Abby said. "Maybe you ought to put that thermos and the glasses away, Joe."
Bruiser the mastiff, trailing the man on horseback, barked and came quickly up the breastwork toward Joe and Abby. Joe gave the dog a friendly smile. Bruiser remembered him and turned to Abby, tongue lolling. She seized him by the ears and Bruiser laid his head in her lap.
"Hey, Luke!" Abby called, as the horse and rider lunged up the breastwork. "Who do you like Sunday, the Panthers or the Chiefs?"
"What's the over/under?"