by Farris, John
"Better drop him by the emergency room at the local hospital," he said to Dayna as she was getting in behind the wheel. "Just to play it safe."
"I could come back for you."
Joe smiled regretfully at her across Norse's slumped
"If not tonight, maybe tomorrow night?" There was a bareness to her lower lip, where she'd eaten most of the lipstick off, as fas as the crimson corners of her mouth. She haggled with little flash glances, the smaller eye Oriental in its tightness; her fingers tapped the steering wheel. He failed to bid. She seemed to realize how dispirited he felt about the brief fight, and the fact that Norse was hurt.
"Guess it turned out to be a lousy evening for you."
"Not your fault, Dayna."
"Dayna with a y," she said. "And Smith. Easy to remember, huh? It's kind of a small place. We'll see each other again."
Joe faked enough enthusiasm to coax a smile from her. "I'll count on it."
Chapter Twenty-Five
Abby arrived at the Planter's House forty minutes past the time she had anticipated, in a customized van with a lowered floor and an automatic sloping ramp to accommodate wheelchairs. Her driver was a young black man whom she introduced as Niles, one of numerous Part-time employees at the Barony involved in maintenance and transportation. Most of them, Abby explained, were related to Walter Lee Clemons.
The van was equipped with a dual-control lever: pull down to accelerate, push forward to brake, while steering with the left hand. "I would've driven myself," Abby said, "but I felt too frazzled."
Her hair was bound up in a designer kerchief and she wore aviator-style sunglasses; through the green lenses her eyes looked nocturnal, condemned to light-less depths, like those sea creatures destined to explode upon reaching the surface. On their way out of town Abby was seated beside Niles, and Joe was in the back with his two pieces of luggage. Most of the time, when she turned her head to talk to him, he couldn't see her eyes at all.
"I thought you didn't have a driver's license," Joe said carelessly.
"Who told you that?"
"Lizzie may have said something."
"Oh. It's true, I don't have a license. I let it lapse—a couple of years ago. Maybe three or four years. I used to drive more. I went places. Then I—got too comfortable, I guess. Or lazy." She forced back a yawn. "'Scuse me. I can't seem to wake up. What did you guys give me last night?"
Joe told her. She said, "When we get to the beach house, I want to hear all about it. Don't spare any of the gruesome details, because I don't remember a thing." In spite of this request she sounded tentative, and frightened by the episode.
"What did Dr. Thomason tell you this morning?"
"Nothing. I was still out of it when he looked in on me. He left the house early, with the senator and what's-her-name, Florence—"
"Flora."
"She seemed nice. They're two peas in a pod, really." Abby held her head at the temples, and took a deep breath. "It's a pretty day, and I've got this fog inside me. Anyway, Luke wanted to show off his polo ponies; then they were having lunch with some party pros at the Rod and Gun Club and after that I think the senator was heading on back to Washington. Luke won't be home until late. I don't know if Charlene's with him or not. Lizzie helped me dress. She has piano and jazz ballet today. God's in His heaven and all's right with the world, except my pulses are jumping like crazy. I haven't written anything in two or three days now, and I feel guilty about that. Jaysus, as if it really mattered. Writers are incredibly neurotic—I bet you didn't know that, did you? What did you and Norse beef about?"
"Some ego thing." Without the wealth of her eyes, the rest of her face seemed flat, her expression impoverished; they weren't really communicating, just bouncing words off each other.
"Any good-looking women involved?"
"Not really."
"It's a pretty good crowd at the Sea Turtle. I always like going there. Was my pal Reggie on last night?"
"He's a hell of a talent."
"I love Reggie. He's only thirty-six. We're probably gonna lose him. Lou Gehrig's disease."
"You ought to go see him more often."
"I know. To cheer him up. Except I'm not feeling so cheery myself lately. How about a good bad joke?"
"Do you know why blind people don't sky-dive?"
"Scares the hell out of their Seeing Eye dogs. Heard it. Sorry."
The beach house on Chicora Island faced the Atlantic Ocean across a twenty-foot dune thick with tufted grasses and sea grape and a stretch of grayish sand swagged with olive-colored strands of beaded kelp cast ashore by the modest squall of the night before. In midafternoon the sky was blue chalkboard crisscrossed with contrails from military jets flying the coastline, but so high their silver ships seemed transparent; low clouds floated on the horizon like gardenias in a cut-glass punch bowl. Two thousand two hundred miles away, northwest of the Cape Verde Islands, the tropical depression that Joe had been watching On the Weather Channel was sucking huge amounts of energy from the warm seas and had developed into a hurricane, the ninth Atlantic hurricane of the season, with winds of up to ninety miles an hour at its center. The hurricane had been dubbed Honey. Honey was moving slowly, for now, at ten to twelve miles an hour, on a course that would take her across the sunken Atlantic Ridge to the Bahamas in approximately a week, depending on how big she became and the unpredictable whims of any hurricane traveling through the horse latitudes.
The two-story Gothic house, set on a tabby foundation, had a steep roof of, hand-cut wooden shingles and a widow's walk, with jigsawed wood gingerbread trim around the open front porch. Recently updated with a heat pump and improved plumbing, the beach house was three miles from the Barony, connected to it by lines strung on telephone poles, no two of which leaned the same way, standing precariously along a crushed-shell road that wound through a treeless intertidal marsh over a series of small bridges. The nearest human neighbors were a third of a mile away, to the north. Birds were plentiful on the dunes, and above it: gulls, ospreys, some shy sandpipers, an occasional pelican or an eagle, hovering like a Chinese kite in the lofty silence.
A young woman from Lillian's kitchen had prepared an early-evening meal for them: bite-sized fritters of fried grits and oyster pieces, a browned-down hen with corn-bread dressing made from the fat drippings of the hen, and Frogmore stew, which was a dish of sausage, shrimp, crab, tomatoes and corn on the cob, boiled in beer. They ate on the broad front porch of the house, with a long view of the island beach as the sea turned from gunmetal blue to the brassy sheen of old nickels. Joe pulled beers from a half-barrel packed full of shaved ice to wash down his first meal of the day; Abby, returned to Rolling Thunder, drank only a California chardonnay, and that sparingly, as if in atonement for her indulgence the night before. They listened to her collection of oldie 45s on a portable record player that was a decade away from qualifying as an antique. She hummed along with the listener-friendly voices. Ricky and Frankie and several Bobbys. The Coasters and the Miracles and the Supremes.
"I got most of these from my aunt Becca. She graduated from high school the year I was born."
"How does she qualify as your aunt?"
"My mother's youngest sister. Change-of-life baby. I haven't seen Becca in donkey's years. I need to give her a call. Becca's one of the blue-star numbers on my Rolodex. That means, 'Call anytime, three in the morning if you're feeling lousy, she'll understand.'"
"Good listeners are hard to come by."
"Now that you've stumbled into my web, I'll have to add your phone number. Doctors are used to calls at all hours, I suppose."
"You don't need a phone number. I'm here."
"But for how long?"
Joe reached out to pull another beer from the barrel. "How strong is your web?"
Abby rested her chin on her folded hands. "I've just begun to weave."
Joe twisted the cap off his beer, stretched, sighed, walked over to her and with his free hand gently removed her sunglasses. She droppe
d her eyes, as if he might be intruding.
"Time to stop covering up."
"I know I look like billy hell," she mumbled.
"No, you don't. Let's talk about it."
"Don't you want some chocolate cake first?"
"I never eat chocolate cake."
"Are you allergic?"
"No." He pulled over a rattan footstool and sat beside her, one elbow on an arm of her wheelchair. "It was the last thing my mother ordered for me before she drove away and abandoned me in a place called Gila Bend, which is approximately the same as the ass-end of nowhere. I was six years old."
Abby blinked mildly, puzzled, then dismayed, thinking of her own extended family, the love and protection she had always enjoyed. "But—mothers don't do things like that—to their children."
"It happened, Abby."
"Why?"
"I'll never know. My best guess is that she was in trouble, something so bad she thought she wouldn't be able to take care of me anymore. She didn't explain. She ordered chocolate cake for me, and drove away while I was stuffing my face. To this day, the odor of chocolate nauseates me."
"Where was your father?"
"That's another story."
"Tell me."
"I had no father. That I remembered. She would say, once I was old enough to miss having a father like the other kids, that he left us both when I was less than two years old. We were living then in Buffalo, where I was born. It was a half truth. His name was Pete. He left by jumping off a bluff into the Niagara River, just before it froze for the winter."
"Killed himself?" The old threat recalled to her the fresh horror of immobility at an early age, the sensation of being little more than half a woman, her naissance as a mermaid with no kick to her heavy anchoring tail, lacking the lightness of the salt sea for buoyancy. "How old was he when he did it?"
"Twenty-one. Two years older than my mother."
"Something really terrible must have happened, for him to do a thing like that. I don't think about it anymore, but there were times when, if I'd had a gun…"
Joe placed two fingers lightly on her furrowed brow, at the place where the occult third eye of intuition, undeveloped in the maturing fetus, supposedly lay, infinitesimal, buried like a pollen grain in amber.
"Hey, now."
She said in a brisker voice, "I'm not suicidal. I think I'm brilliant and I know I'm famous; I've had good luck to go with the bad. I love my life. I don't risk aggravating the Powers by pissing and moaning over a lousy twist of fate. I don't ask for more. Not much more, anyway."
"I'm glad to see you smile again."
His fingertips traced a curving line past an eyebrow, to the outer parabola of cheekbone and then the angle of her downy jaw. Her eyes closed slowly; her smile was firm and sweet. He stroked the line of her jaw, and lingered on the pulse in her throat. The last platter from that American age of innocence brought to an end by gunfire in Dallas plopped down the changer onto the little turntable. Bobby Vee sang in his mournful prom-night tenor "Devil or Angel." Shh-boom, shh-boom. The wind from the sea tangled her hair around his caressing hand and wrist. Sand sifted across the worn planks of the porch floor, adding to the Lilliputian dune where the porch met the front wall of the house. Her shoulders had relaxed; she breathed so deeply he thought he had put her to sleep until she blinked mildly and asked, "Did you ever learn why?"
"I took a long bus ride back to Buffalo the summer I graduated high school. Looked up some relatives who almost had forgotten I existed. The Petruskas. Working-class neighborhood. Narrow frame houses on high terraces. A few rosebushes to dress up corroded old chain-link fences. Kids drinking beer and working on their souped-up cars in the street. Two elderly aunts of mine lived together in one of those houses with about twenty cats, and most of the family memorabilia: albums, Bibles, faded wedding triptychs. They even had a picture of me with my mother when I was just beginning to sit up in her lap. They were Aunt Flossie and Aunt Bernarda. Flossie Petruska was almost blind and Bernarda had arthritis so bad her hands looked like toads bloated in a poisoned pond. But her memory was intact. So I found out from her that there had been some good in the marriage of my mother and father, even though it was a forced marriage because of her truth—well, she must have been saving it for the time when she thought I would be old enough to under
He took his hand from Abby's face and sat back on the footstool. She frowned slightly, eyelids flickering, and held out a hand in protest. The little fingernail was ravaged to the quick, as if it was the only one sheallowed herself to chew while in the throes of creation. He grasped the hand lightly, and she pulled him toward her again, locking him tighter, his knuckles resting in the space between her collarbones.
"Pete Petruska was a mechanic who worked for a big trucking company. He had an accident on the job, not an uncommon type of accident. There's a machine they use to help lever the big tires back onto the rims after they've been patched. Tremendous compression, a couple of thousand pounds per square foot. If you're not careful, a tire weighing sixty pounds can blow backoff the rim and into your face. The damage it causes is almost unbelievable. They do the surgery, over and over again, years of it. But there's no surgeon skilled enough to make one of the poor bastards look human again."
She raised his hand and kissed it with a solemn tenderness.
"Do you look most like your father, or your mother?"
"I have the face he would have had. He was a very good-looking kid, before his accident."
"But it was too much for your mother. His disfigurement. The pain. I know. I feel so sorry for her."
"The smell may have been the worst thing about it. That's what Bernarda thought. The smell drove my mother away and him to the brink of the Niagara River."
Abby opened her gray eyes inquiringly, pressing their joined hands lightly against the underside of her thrust-out chin.
"Pete was scarred, of course. But his face just sagged, because there was no muscle tone. His lips were twisted and didn't meet, so there was no way to keep the saliva in. Because some of his teeth were always exposed to the air, he had to coat them with glycerine so they wouldn't dry out and rot. He had to wear a towel around his neck to soak up the constant drool, just buckets of it. That was the worst of the smell, which the strongest men's cologne couldn't hide. His voice was funny; without a mobile tongue and the right lip movements he couldn't pronounce words very well. You can imagine the kind of—freak he thought himself to be. The injury was terrible, but the—the indignity, the humiliation, had to be worse. That was what destroyed him. There are deficits in life no one can be expected to deal with."
"I know that to be true," she said, looking past him as another of the several gulls called to supper by the savory airs of hot stuff on the brazier floated in off the sea to clutch at the porch rail and tilt its black bill hungrily in her direction. She released Joe's hand to break bread and fling a hard crust well over the heads of the gulls. They all scattered in pursuit, to be robbed by a fierce latecomer on blurring wings. Abby looked again at Joe, downcast. "I was at my worst last night. Don't know why I couldn't stop drinking. Sometimes there's a black hole I try to pour myself into. Scared hell out of poor Luke. Among others. What do I do now, Joe?"
"The best advice I can give you is to go for a thorough checkup."
"Another tour of the body? Those multimillion-dollar machines whining and clicking, creeping over me and looking through me... I always feel like I'm being prepped for a high-tech burial. We've been there, Joe. Luke and me. I've got a nice-looking backbone. The vertebrae are crisp and clear. There's no dark snake wrapping itself around my brain stem. Luke sends a little bottle of my blood out once a month for analysis. Guess what? I'm healthy, my weight's under control, I don't think about tile indignities and the discomfort very often, the occasional bedwetting when I'm not punctual about sitting myself on the john, the—nightmares. I just don't let myself think about all that. Abby's a very positive thinker, except for those times when her blac
k hole appears. Tell me honestly: would I have died last night if I hadn't had prompt medical attention?"
Joe walked to the edge of the porch and leaned against the railing;
"I don't know. You might have strangled on your own vomit."
"Why was I vomiting, if it was a seizure?"
"I don't think you had a seizure. It was more of an extreme allergic reaction."
"To what? I've never been allergic to insect bites or stings. Nothing stung me anyway, did it?"
"I didn't see a place on your body where you might have been stung. But—I wasn't all that thorough in examining you; I deferred to Dr. Thomason, of course."
"Food poisoning? I ate some ribs. So did everybody else."
Out of ideas, Joe shook his head. The girl from Lillian's kitchen appeared diffidently to remove their trays and glasses. "Miss Abby," she said, "after I clean up would you be needin' me for anything else?"
"No, thank you, Keneesha. Call the Barony when you're ready to go and have someone drive over to pick YOU up."
"Yes, ma'am."
When Keneesha returned to the house, Abby propelled herself by hand to the edge of the porch, stopping beside Joe.
"So I'm a medical puzzle."
"To me, you are."
"Do you think Luke could have missed something? I know, there are people who don't think much of his abilities. There were suits brought against him when he practiced in Beaufort years ago—but a lot of doctors get sued, don't they?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Seems to be the guiding principle of the legal profession these days: to err is human, to litigate, divine. But I have complete confidence in Luke. I've always had confidence."
"I don't know of any reason why you shouldn't."
Instead of feeling reassured, the confidence she had professed began to slip away like an armload of sand.
"Could you examine me, Joe? Luke has everything you need, doesn't he? I'd feel better. I really would."