Dragonfly

by Farris, John

  Kristi was on the back porch with Carol Ann from next door when Charles walked outside. His thrill continued, intensified by the sight of the spectacular sunset, clouds in rosy galactic spirals, which they'd been treated to this evening. God bless America.

  "Who was that on the phone?" Kristi asked. Her posture was hunched and forlorn on the top step.

  He smiled and then hugged her so hard she squirmed in dismay. The light of his life. Safe, protected. I wish I could tell you that, he thought. "Oh, nobody. What do you say we just forget about the algebra and we'll all go over to Dairy Queen for a treat."

  Chapter Nineteen

  One of the women at the barbecue was saying, "... On Wednesday nights in the Community Room at the library. We've had some fascinating speakers for our series on Children in Crisis; but no one quite as capable as yourself, I'm sure, to bring the reality of the suffering nations of Africa close to our own lives. Would you have any slides?"

  "Sure," Joe said, but then he shook his head, warningly. "It's pretty nasty stuff. Close-ups of AIDS-related sarcomas, lesions from sexually transmitted diseases, swollen joints the size of baseballs, twisted limbs—"

  "Ohh," the woman said. Her name was Daisy. Her own petals were graying at the tips, becomingly, and her large brown eyes were filled with concern. "These are all children?"

  "I'm afraid so. Half the babies we see have been born HIV-positive." He sipped his drink. He had moved on from beer to Glenfiddich, neat, provided by an extremely thoughtful host from his own, not the bar stock. The whiskey was thirty years old and almost worth its weight in gold. Scotch, even the best, eventually gave Joe a headache like tiny bees buzzing inside his temples. But it also controlled a tendency for his mood to swing toward the colder reaches of his heart, to that region of disappointment and failure as he continued to play to an audience captivated by the character he couldn't shed. "I'm a doctor," Joe continued, in a wearier tone of voice. "I photographed what was pertinent to me, not mood shots of giraffes gathered around a water hole at twilight. In fact, I never saw a giraffe all the time I was in Africa. Or an elephant. Or cattle that were fit to eat."

  Daisy nodded, responding to the mood of his eyes, his slight tone of bitterness in the face of appalling catastrophe. Daisy was enthralled. She was fortyish, as full-breasted as a setting hen. He'd met her husband, one of those loud boozers whose face is an atlas of dissipation, his life a ship on the rocks. Joe didn't know what her extramarital stats were, but he knew just how she would play it if, a little later, he took Daisy off to a private corner for a communion of lonely hearts. For every woman desirous of a tame love affair there are ten who want to be trampled by a wounded god in rut.

  An iron triangle, beaten with a long-handled spoon, rang like a fire bell in the night.

  "Ribs, ribs!" cried the chef of the catering crew, whose name was Shorty. He wore a tall cook's hat and a nearly floor-length apron covered, like an artist's palette, with dabs and smears of sauces. "Y'all come get 'em, right now!"

  Daisy touched Joe lightly on the back of one wrist. "I do want to persuade you to come and see us. We're not at all a frivolous group, Dr. Bryce."

  "Joe. I'm sure of that, Daisy."

  "Are you staying at the Barony while you're visiting?"

  "No, I'm at the Planter's House in Nimrod's Chapel."

  "I would like to give you a call."

  "By all means," Joe said, with a measure of gratitude in his smile while at the same time he was thinking, and she must have seen this in his eyes, Come naked, bitch. He had to turn away from Daisy because of the rage, storming out of nowhere that accompanied the thought. He was like a ship on the rocks himself, battered, engulfed, sinking.

  Where was Abby? He thought he heard her voice, but she was below his line of sight in her wheelchair, somewhere on the veranda, cheery and vitalized by good company. The crowd outdoors, eighty or more guests, with still more guests in the house, murmured appreciatively at the promise of feasting and began to move toward the twin tents set up on the strip of Bermuda lawn between the low wall of the veranda and the garden hedges. It was a kind of slow sideways falling-out, as if the brick-paved veranda had been tilted slightly in that direction. Daisy's husband claimed her; his eyes, when they focused on Joe, were swarmingly infected with envy and dislike. In the open-sided tents caterers were loading the tables with platters of steam-wreathed baby-back ribs, succulent pulled pork and corn on the cob; great wooden bowls of salad and baked beans; loaves of just-baked bread; crocks of butter; sparkling dishes filled with savories both hot and cold. Joe stayed where he was, nodding and smiling as the veranda crowd thinned around him. He had a glimpse of Abby, operating her wheelchair at trolling speed, looking up and back at Lucas Thomason a couple of paces behind her.

  "These days the Second Golden Rule seems to be, Somebody had to get screwed before you could be born, so carry on in the grand tradition."

  "Luke, you don't believe that!" Elaborately drawling the last syllable as a remonstrance. Her voice a Southern woodwind of infinite notation. There were women whom you couldn't bear to hear more of after a single sentence. But Abby's voice both defined the person and invited the listener to audit another, wordless language as subtle as the tidings of the blood.

  "Didn't say I believe it. I still hold sacred the original Golden Rule. But, present company included, I'm afraid we find ourselves a rapidly shrinking minority."

  "It's a depressin' view," said Senator Miller Harkness. "But not at all inaccurate. When people ask what's wrong with their government, they ought to be acquainted with the fact that seven out of ten Americans belong to some group or other that has what can be defined as 'special interests'; and a good many of them belong to four or more such groups. With so much indiscriminate pressure, the institution of government, like any other institution, may eventually be persuaded to make a mockery of its best intentions by serving only to codify the flaws of the governed. Ignorance and greed are the pettiest of evils—until they attain the stature of law."

  The novice politician and the distinguished senator, who were related in some complex manner, seemed to be hitting it off. Joe realized that Abby was looking for him. He waited a few moments for several old parties to move slowly out of his way; Lizzie then spotted him and said, "Here'sJoe." He started toward Abby as they all turned and, while Abby paused to wait for him, Joe saw Flora Birdsall coming from the house with Charlene and Adele Franklin.

  He had nowhere to go. The veranda was nearly cleared. In the next moment Flora took him in, and, possibly not believing her eyes, stopped and stared.

  Joe reacted by devoting all of his attention to Abby, turning his back and ignoring Flora. His confusion, the threat her unexpected appearance posed, he concealed with an old-fashioned gesture, taking Abby's hand and kissing it. What the hell, as Spence Lebêque had observed, he could get away with such corn as few men could. It was the Old South—her Old South—after all.

  Lizzie almost spoiled it by tittering, but the blush on Abby's face, the delight in her eyes, made all the difference.

  "Oh-oh, is this serious?" Lucas Thomason said, his tone lower than his normal speaking voice, and without any shading of humor.

  Abby glanced flippantly at him. "Oh, Luke, it's a game we've been playing today. How could you miss the connection? Joseph Bryce? Captain Joseph Bryce, doesn't that ring a bell?"

  "Hey, now. Sure does. Flames of War, that's the right book, isn't it?"

  "Yep. You're back in my good graces, mon. Joe, have you met Senator Harkness?"

  "A pleasure, sir." Joe shook a stubby hard hand, looking him in the eye; then he looked confidently, reassuringly at Flora, now standing at the senator's side. However she'd managed to suppress her own surprise, or shock, the effort had left her looking shrink-wrapped, stored like the future meal of a spider, alive but without a glimmer of animation. "Hello," Joe said, bearing down with his smile, bearing down psychically as well—Remember me, we were fucking in the Red Roof Inn not six weeks ago—and aler
tness returned none too soon, first with a flicker in her eyes, then a tentative smile. She swallowed; she was calm. She extended her own, cold hand.

  "I'm Flora Birdsall. Captain, ah—"

  "No," Abby said, "that's my Joe Bryce, purely a figment of my imagination. This Joe's a doctor, from Zillionois or some Midwest place like that."

  "Oh, silly of me. I'm sorry." She smiled at Abby, still gathering strength, recovering her poise. "And you must be Pam—Pamela Abelard."

  "Yes, I am. Welcome to the Barony, Ms. Birdsall. Someone said you weren't feeling well?"

  "Oh, it was nothing. Just a bumpy plane ride, but I'm over it now."

  The senator put his arm around her, murmured something intimate in her ear. Flora seemed comfortable in his embrace. Lovebirds. She was over Joe, too, at least for the moment. And so they all went to dinner.

  Chapter Twenty

  Senator Harkness was a man who tended to raise a sweat when drinking. It couldn't have been the humidity, which was low this evening, or the temperature, which had fallen into the low sixties: cool enough for most of the women to be wearing wraps. The senator was drinking Jim Beam on the rocks and he'd also taken in a massive amount of pork tenderloin with baked beans. There was a dab of barbecue sauce on a lens of his glasses. He had loosened the knot of his tie.

  "I believe it was Gore Vidal who once remarked to me that the world was governed by deeds, not motives. A simple truth, plainly spoken. But of course not all of us have Gore's ability to speak so well. The truth is always simple. It is language that makes difficulties for truth. As for deeds: they are far too often governed by flimflam, mischance, cronyism, crackpot ideology and plain old-fashioned bad faith. That the world works at all may be evidence of some sort of divine intervention. Or, at least, the occasional spark of divinity in those ordinary men we find in the ranks of leadership who are determined to muddle through regardless."

  He bowed his head momentarily, one hand on his half-filled glass. The little fleck of barbecue sauce seemed a spot of pain near the iris of his eye. It was obvious how drunk he was, and a wonder, Joe thought, that he could still be so fluent. A matter of habit, presumably, as well as lifelong practice. He liked Harkness, and hoped it was going to work out for Flora. And that Flora was going to work out for Joe, although it seemed unlikely he would have a chance to get her alone and explain his feelings, the revision of his plans. Joe knew what she was thinking, every time she looked at Abby, who in her wheelchair was one of their party of eight at the table. She had refrained from looking at Joe, had not looked at him once since they had seated themselves. Furious that, from all appearances, he'd broken their covenant by stalking a crippled woman.

  Flora said, covering the senator's other hand protectively, "God has always sent us great men when we need them."

  He raised his glass and drained what was left. The additional infusion of Jim Beam seemed to be just enough to get him out of kilter. He continued to hold the glass as if he were about to propose a toast. Nothing came to mind. So he smiled and said, "I should have been president. Should have been." His eloquence had worn thin, his hair had slumped toward his eyebrows and seemed grayer, he groped to express his dismal regrets. "So we shuffled the deck in the primaries, and what popped up? This wild card, this political stud muffin from the Muskrat State with his horny little Phi Beta Kappa wife, looks like everybody's kid sister. Yessir. The two of 'em just as earnest and for a home. Tooth enamel! Goddamn tooth enamel, that's all we're sellin' on television these days."

  The senator half rose from his chair and smiled in a complex way at Abby.

  "You're so delightful. So talented. I apologize for airing what grievances I may still have at your lovely party."

  Abby raised her own glass to him. "Senator, I understand. And I think the president is a prick, too."

  "Now, if I can just find my way to a bathroom before it's too late—"

  "Use mine," Charlene said, as if she loved the idea of a real United States senator urinating in the exact place where she did hers everyday.

  Flora also was on her feet, making her best effort to appear at ease.

  "I'll just go with you, Miller, I know the way."

  "There's peach shortcake for dessert!" Charlene said, with the unengaging smile girls learned for preteen beauty pageants, startling and almost gruesome in its failure to convey any real emotion. She was sitting next to Joe, and she'd given him the lowdown on the pageant hustle. Her good cheekbones had come from her mother, who otherwise had not realized her own potential due to a birth trauma that had left her with a withered arm and mediocre marriage prospects. Her father had been an aggrieved and testy man who worked as an engineer for a radio station; his hobby was logging thousands of solitary miles on the Appalachian Trail until, one summer, he disappeared in the vicinity of Waynesboro, Virginia. Charlene was pretty well convinced that her father was an alien abductee whom the aliens hadn't given back yet. She didn't go deeply into her reasons for believing this was so, but it might have had to do with the fact that her father was a rare blood type, thus qualifying him for extensive analysis by intelligent beings from another world. Charlene had been born luckier than either her father or her mother: type O, flawless and adorable. But, after working her way up to Atlantic City and finishing out of the money, she had left home and the sting of her mother's disappointments. In New York she survived the modeling game for a couple of years, where her look never became the look, cast her lot with a succession of interesting but ultimately unmarriable men—a manic-depressive director of off-Broadway plays, a Wall Street trader who slept on a rag rug in an otherwise empty apartment and never spent a dime on her, the scion of an English distillery family whose lovely manners in public didn't carry over into the bedroom, where he dislocated her shoulder one night applying some antique device of torture while laboring to get an erection.

  Seven weeks after arriving back in South Carolina she was married in a civil ceremony to Lucas Thomason, whom she met at a medical convention where she was working as a decorative sales rep for a manufacturer of ultrasonic surgical equipment. She had more or less patched things up with her mother, who was dying of a life-long affection for unfiltered tobacco, and she was still waiting for her father to be dropped off at some crossroads minus his memory of years spent as a guinea pig on a spaceship. She loved decorating and wanted to make it her life's work; she had begged Lucas to buy an interest in a shop in Charleston so that she could put her talents to wider use. But he was so wrapped up in the political thing he wouldn't indulge her.

  "Of course, it's not his money," Charlene confided. "I don't think he ever had a pot to pee in, even when he was in family practice. You know, that's what doctors do when they don't have any real talent. Write prescriptions for sore throats and stomach aches and refer everything that looks like it might be the least bit tricky. I saw his grades from medical school once, and he did just scrape through."

  Her voice had become a little too loud, following the departure of Miller Harkness and Flora Birdsall. Abby heard her, in spite of the recorded music by Jimmy Buffett that had been in the background all through dinner.

  "Charlene," Abby said, her own voice harsh from the night air, "I don't think Joe is interested in hearing a lot of who-shot-John about the next governor of the Palmetto State."

  "Well—that remains to be seen, I suppose," Charlene said, smiling but snippy.

  Abby's chin came up, as if she might be in a fighting mood. Her eyes looked tired, the whites fuming. Joe, seated between Charlene and Abby, said to Abby, "Got a bad joke for you."

  "Hey," Abby said, brightening somewhat. "The bad-der the better." She moved a hand slowly to the glass she'd been drinking from while ignoring most of the food on her plate. The ice had mostly melted. She dumped out what was in the glass next to her wheelchair and put the glass in her lap. She unscrewed the top from the silver flask that had accompanied her to dinner and emptied the remaining ounces of vodka it contained into her glass. The vodka, as far as
Joe had been able to tell, was all that she'd had to drink for about an hour. An untouched flute of red wine stood beside her plate.

  Joe said, "What's this? 'Clippity-clop, BANG! Clippity-clop, BANG! Clippity-clop, BANG!'"

  Abby grinned delightedly, raised her glass to her lips. "No idea."

  "Amish drive-by shooting."

  Abby tossed her head back abruptly with a show of teeth, in a mime of laughter. But all that came from her throat was a strangled gasp.

  No one realized that she was in trouble until the hand holding the glass trembled. Vodka sloshed across the tops of her breasts. Then a second, more violent tremor hit her like a cattle prod.

  "Oh, my lord!" Charlene said shrilly.

  Joe bolted to Abby's side. He was trying to pry the glass out of her grip when it shattered, cutting them both. She stared at him, her mouth working. Her skin was turning fiery red. She seemed to be all muscle and errant energy, no way to hold her still. Joe looked around and saw Lucas Thomason coming, knocking over empty chairs like a clumsy hurdler.

  Saliva mixed with blood slid down Abby's chin. Her eyes were rolling back in her head; they looked faded and glum, as if her soul had been locked into the mechanism of a carnival thrill ride. Her dusky-rose eyelids fluttered. She had begun to sweat, and the pale hairs of her forearms were erect, spiky as the spines of a tiny cactus. He picked her up in his arms as if she were a large, awry ventriloquist's dummy, very heavy and inert from the waist down compared to her whiplash arms and jittery torso.

  Thomason reached them, his livid face wrinkled like a walnut.

  "Help me get her into the infirmary, Doctor!"

  "What?" Joe said, confused; he was intent on maintaining his grip, not dropping Abby. One of her hands, the bloodied hand, lightly slapped his cheek as if she were begging for surcease.