Dragonfly

by Farris, John

  "I can't, Abby. If I undress you, it will be to make love to you."

  She said, after a quick explosive laugh that seemed to take her breath away, "I'm not ready for that."

  Joe shrugged amiably, folded his arms in a show of comfort, and watched her.

  Abby said, her loss of breath resulting in a precariously light head, "That was—a scary thing to say."

  "You mean it's scary to think about."

  She laughed again, and looked perplexed. "You know how to get inside a person's mind, don't you?"

  "It's a knack I have."

  "Well—I am scared, Joe; must be one of those deficits you mentioned that can't—be dealt with. So I guess we ought to leave it right there."

  "No problem, Abby. Why don't we break out some of that gear I saw inside and go surf-casting?"

  "Me too?" Her cheeks reddened with pleasure. "Hey, I haven't done any fishing since—well, I guess it was—shoot, I don't even remember."

  "Then we're not going to waste another minute."

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Abby returned from the beach house at ten-thirty and rode her little elevator, which (she liked to say) was almost as slow as capillary action, to the second floor. Her hands were puffy and red and still weak from the action of fishing with a ten-foot graphite rod, side-casting her lures beyond the surf and popping them back with quick movements that eventually brought her two puppy drum and several speckled sea trout, which Joe released, along with his own numerous catches. The fish seemed to be jumping out of the water at them, hitting both spoons and live bait until the last light of sunset faded from the clouds. It was the most excitement she'd had since she'd given up going to the NASCAR races at Darlington Speedway. She fished in waders and a waterproof parka from one of the sturdy wooden deck chairs Joe had carried from the porch to the foam line. Past dark they had lingered on the beach around a driftwood fire, sharing a pot of warmed-over Frogmore stew and playing gin until the wind rose to scatter their cards: kings, queens and grin-fling jokers floated to oblivion on the brimming tide. Her back and shoulders ached from the demands of surf-casting; her hair was a salty stiff tangle, there was salt in her eyebrows and sand, unfelt, between her bare toes. With his back against a tree trunk as thick as a fallen temple column, scoured smooth and bleached white by sun and surf, he'd made a chair of himself for her, so that her head rested in the hollow of one shoulder; his hands were lightly clasped beneath her breasts.

  "Maybe," she'd said, gazing half-asleep at the firelit tumble of waves, "what I need is a black cat bone."

  "What's that?"

  "A black cat bone is part of the Root Man's medicine. Stronger than any force in nature, because its powers are supernatural. An old-time Gullah Root Man who owns a black cat bone can undo any evil, cure any spell. He can raise the dead, or put a wandering spirit back in its grave. Expel demons from the bodies of the sick or crippled."

  "Your creative mind is spooking you. What got you started on demons?"

  "Maybe instead of a rational explanation, my trouble is irrational: a hex. Did you study hexes in medical school?"

  "Our resident Root Man was on sabbatical that term. Tell me where, and I'll hunt up a black cat bone for you."

  "Don't bother, you're an unbeliever. You can't buy a black cat bone; it wouldn't have a lick of power to it. You have to make your own. Ask Lillian. She knows how it's done. You have to catch yourself a black cat by the dark of the moon. Completely black, no white foot or little white spot under its chin like most of them have. Then you heat water in a big black iron pot on the stove until it comes to a full, rolling boil. Throw the cat in alive. The cat will stand up on its hind legs and talk like a man, but in a language no living soul has heard before. Then, when the cat is good and boiled, you put the remains in a burlap bag and carry it to the sea. You wait for the tide to go out, then cast the cat on the waves. All of it will be carried with the tide out to sea. Except for one bone, which will come right back to your hand. That bone has the power you seek."

  Abby stopped at the door to Lizzie's room on her way down the second-floor hail and knocked. Lizzie didn't respond, but the door wasn't firmly latched and the television was on inside. She pushed the door open. Lizzie was lounging in pajamas on the trapunto spread of the four-poster bed, listening to rap music on her headphones, watching TV and leafing through a teen magazine at the same time. She'd munched her way through a bag of potato chips and drunk half a pitcher of Lillian's grape-juice lemonade. She took off the headphones when she saw Abby.

  "Hi. Where've you been?"

  "At the beach."

  "Who with?"

  "Joe. I moved him out of the Planter's House. He'll be staying in the beach house for a while."

  "He will?"

  "Elizabeth Ann, is something wrong with your ears?"

  "No. That's great." Lizzie sat on the edge of the high bed, one bare foot lapped over the other, studying her. "Did you all have a lot to talk about?"

  "I guess so. You're acting funny, what's wrong?"

  "Nothing. You look tired."

  "We did some surf-casting. My back is killing me. I'm going to do my nightly routine, then pop into the tub for a soak. Could I ask you to help me wash my hair and then give me a rubdown?"

  "Sure."

  Abby rolled into the bathroom that she and Lizzie shared. It had been rebuilt and enlarged with space taken from a big closet Abby didn't need, to make matters of personal hygiene as easy as possible. There were so many chrome grab bars with slip-proof grips that the bathroom had the aspect of an indoor jungle gym. The bars provided easy access to a toilet seat raised to a convenient height, eliminating one of the more difficult problems of transfer for a paraplegic. There were easy-to-reach dispensers for the plastic catheters she used three or four times a day to completely void her bladder, and cut down on infection, and another dispenser for latex gloves. A long time ago she had numbed her mind to the procedure she'd learned in rehab for emptying paralyzed bowels, one of her Activities of Daily Living, or ADLs. The concave washbasin and counter accepted Abby and her wheelchair like a piece of a puzzle. So did the whirlpool bath.

  Undressing herself completely took time because of the lined underpants she always wore; she had to peel them off while hanging like a chimpanzee from a grab bar. Before she had decided to lose an extra twenty-five pounds, lifting her own weight had been damned near impossible. With her tedious toilet out of the way and the latex gloves disposed of, she ran water in the tub and set the whirlpool timer. Tonight she had spasticity again, the left leg this time. Muscles alive but out of control, governed by some upper motor neuron defect. The spasticity, although she was used to it, was powerful and eerie and always gave her goose bumps. But the involuntary exercise was responsible for the health of her muscle tissue, keeping her legs supple and strong.

  When the spasticity ended she lifted and plopped herself down in the roiling water and relaxed with her neck in the grip of a flotation pillow that kept her head always above the water level. She called to Lizzie.

  "Is Luke home yet?" she asked, when Lizzie came in.

  "No. He called from the gun club earlier. I didn't tell him you went anywhere. Isaid you were working. Frosty wants you to call her about the miniseries Spelling wants to do, and the signed limited editions.

  "Okay. How was your day?"

  Lizzie said with a shudder of angst, "I'm never gonna learn the Chopin in time for the fall recital! Why did Charlene have to send our piano out to be refinished?"

  "Don't ask me; Charlene just does things without consulting anybody. If the piano's not back soon, we'll rent one."

  Lizzie took off her pajama top to wash and rinse Abby's hair with the shower extension. Suds from the shampoo ran down Abby's shoulders and reefed around her breasts; she cupped them in her hands, holding them up to be rinsed too.

  "You have the most beautiful tits," Lizzie said wistfully, playing the light spray back and forth, symbolizing the not-to-be-expressed yearning in her
own breast with this attentive laying, then holding the shower head close to rinse Abby's tender nape, working her drenched hair the wrong way to get all of the conditioner out. "Look at me; bubbies is all there is." She despised them with a downward glance, those little gum-colored protuberances that dominated without beautifying her chest. "I think I need implants. But I guess that would look funny if I didn't have any hips to sort of balance them."

  Abby came back from a pleasant lull to realize she'd been asked to comment on an ever-present subject between them. "Stop worrying, Lizzie. Everybody has awkward phases growing up."

  "I'll bet you didn't."

  Abby grinned in an exaggerated way. "See my front teeth? Well, one of them used to go this way, and the other went that way. I looked like a razorback hog. I mean I wouldn't open my mouth in seventh grade until they were straightened."

  "I think you need to shave under your arms," Lizzie said critically.

  "Would you get my razor for me, hon?"

  Abby liked reading aloud to prepare for her own, dictated work; after Lizzie rubbed her down thoroughly with a light oil that Norse had recommended and helped her into her pajamas, Abby picked up Bleak House and Lizzie stretched out facedown on the bed beside her. After five minutes of skullduggery in and around the High Court of Chancery, Lizzie was fast asleep:

  Abby smiled and put the book aside, picked up her tape recorder and pressed Rewind, to hear what she had dictated during her last work session.

  There was no cassette in the recorder. It bothered her. Frosty had always been faithful about returning the tape after she transcribed a night's work, so that Abby easily could pick up the strands of the story she was weaving. Frosty's lapse was a major inconvenience for Abby. Her choice was to wake up Lizzie and send her stumbling off into the night to retrieve the tape from the workroom, or go herself.

  Lizzie's face was slack in dreamless sleep on the other pillow. The hell with it, she thought, a little irritably. With her latest novel high on all the best-seller lists she was far from under any contractual pressure to deliver the new book, which she had titled The Flame and the Fox: a romance, like the others, this one set in the time of the French and Indian War. Her impulse to get to work was ebbing, although this was almost a monthly thing, like the painless, punctual menses that reminded her of her healthy unusable uterus. Abby worked at her trade regardless of the level of inspiration involved, happy when the words poured freely, grumpy and disconsolate when they came haltingly out of a blanketing fog.

  Although her head was clear tonight, her lungs refreshed as if she'd just completed a hard swim, she couldn't remember much of what she'd written lately.The names of characters slipped from her grasp like the fish Joe had pulled from their hooks and waded into waist-high surf to release. The story was vague in her recall, its plotlines twisted into ambiguities. Maybe instead of trying to dictate she ought to review some of her research, which was contained in two thick loose-leaf binders on the table beside the queen-size brass bed. But more reading didn't appeal to her; her eyes felt gritty from long exposure to sun and wind.

  Having decided to do nothing, Abby folded her hands below her breasts, then let them slip over her belly and down to her navel; from there it was only inches, four inches at most, to what she thought of as the Barrier: an invisible line just below the abdominal wall where feeling didn't exist: and down, down to the lips of her vagina—"surrounded by a little garden in the valley of her thighs, plump, firm, and so well set for love's great tournament." Villon's old lady had lamented for her lost youth, but at least had been sensually fulfilled, had enjoyed the divine pleasure of vaginal orgasm. Abby's own garden, closed and sere. A sensual limitation, perhaps, but she knew that, erotically speaking, all humans were polymorphs. Abby raised her hands to her breasts, always so sensitive but now excruciatingly so. A lovely distraction today, she thought, stroking her nipples as surrogate for the man she desired: a character come to life from a pile of pages, driving all of her other creations right out of her head. You are not fair, Joe Bryce. And this is too distracting, what am I up to, anyway?

  She could have watched him for hours: he surf-cast in the English manner, holding the long rod vertically instead of like a javelin, then swinging it perpendicular to his body with the lure far away, bringing it close again and behind his head, finally swinging it out in an arc with the butt hand pulling and the hand on the reel pushing to accelerate the lure like a lazy goldenbullet, sending it nearly five hundred feet over the breakers. (Abby gasped and gasped again, and lifted her fingertips from nipples that felt as if they were going to burst into flame.) He wore a bulky sweater and waders for fishing. The lines of his body were obscured by the clownlike apparel, but she easily imagined him as naked as a Greek discobolus: his precise, rhythmic movements, the wheeling power of his throw. (Now a feeling of ease, of lassitude spreading slowly from the still-prickling swollen nipples like thin sweet oil across the skin, she was floating, buoyant, aware only of sensual joy, it was like not having a body at all.) It would be nice, Abby thought, to invite him to swim with her….

  "Abby? Are you awake?"

  Her nipples were apparent beneath the cotton pajama top. Abby crossed her arms over her breasts and said, "Hey, come on in, Luke."

  He opened the hail door. He had a bag of Dunkin' Donuts with him.

  "Oh, no! I hope you ate most of those yourself."

  "There's a couple of buttermilk, a glazed and a jelly. Charlene had the rest. With her metabolism, she can gorge and not gain an ounce."

  "We'll save the jelly for Lizzie in the morning, she likes those best. I'll take buttermilk."

  Abby reached for one of the twin trapeze bars suspended thirty inches above her low bed and sat herself up. Thomason sat on the edge of the bed and handed a doughnut to her, munched on one himself. He was dressed sportily, in a shooting vest with emblems of the clubs he belonged to, smelling of old powder and gun oil. He had shaved early that morning, and stubble was showing in the creases of his chin like bits of mica.

  "There's a lot of color in your cheeks tonight," Thomason said approvingly.

  "I went surf fishing. By the way, I lent Dr. Bryce our beach house for a few days."

  "You did? I thought he was on his way home." He brushed sugar crumbs from his lips and took her free hand to count her pulse.

  "Not yet."

  Thomason nodded, as if he found that informative. "Well. Maybe he'd like to go up to Florence with me tomorrow for the polo matches."

  "I'm not invited?" Abby said, putting on a sulk.

  "Sure you are. If you feel up to it. You've never showed much interest in the game."

  "It made me nervous watching that time. I was afraid you'd get hurt. I just feel like I should go out more."

  "Can't see any harm in it." He was silent for twenty seconds, counting. "Pulse is way fast. Been exerting yourself?"

  "No, I was just lying here thinking. Exciting thoughts."

  He yawned, overlooking the invitation to pry. "Want me to put Lizzie in her own room?"

  "No, leave her here. She kicks and I wake up and remember to move my ass around, and I don't get half the pressure sores I used to. Do you like him, Luke?"

  "Who's that?"

  "Joe."

  He had risen to go; he sat down again, running a hand over his jaw. His crimped pale lips pressed together thoughtfully. "Oh. . . on short acquaintance, he seems like a personable young fella."

  "He's more than that." Her smile was bliss; her eyes rolled to the tray ceiling, half-drunk with intrigue, womanly secrets. "Much more."

  Lizzie stirred in the bed and sat up slowly, saturated with sleep. She stared at Lucas Thomason's face without recognizing him, winced like a testy angel and plunged back to the sanctuary of her pillow. Abby placed a hand on her shoulder, feeling tremors, as if in her sleep Lizzie was running from something stark and unfriendly.

  "Abby—am I allowed to be frank here?"

  "Of course, Luke," she said, lowering her eyelids a litt
le, still staring at the ceiling with its painted tin intaglio panels, flecked with spurts of light from the candelabra fixture overhead.

  "We both know you have a highly impulsive, romantic nature, which in part accounts for your success as a novelist—but which has not been to your benefit in the past."

  "Do you know? It's been thirteen years since I've loved anyone like I loved Paul Huskisson."

  "You were running away with him to get married the night the two of you got run over. Which is what I mean by impulsive."

  "No, Luke. We were on our way to the Beaufort Holiday Inn to spend the night together. Marriage wasn't in the picture yet."

  "Tantamount to being married."

  "Well, it didn't happen, I was a virgin that night and I will be a virgin when I die. Luke, I'm finally ready to let Paul go."

  "I'd call that a mixed blessing," he grumbled. "If you're thinking of falling in love with Joe Bryce."

  Abby laughed, quite happily.

  "You don't 'think about it,' Luke. It just happens." She turned her face toward him and said chidingly, "It's sure happened to you, often enough. What was it I heard you say once? 'The vicious circle is a little band of gold'?"

  He had to smile. "If that's not God's own truth. But Abby—I don't think I could survive seeing you suffer again, the way you suffered when Paul finally died of his head injuries."

  "You look scared to me, Luke. What is it? Do you know something about me that you don't want to tell?"

  "Absolutely not, that's poppycock. But I don't have the answers right now, so naturally I'm concerned about what happened last night."

  "You'll find the answers. Someone will. In the meantime I only want to be happy, and not think about Paul, God rest him, and not think about dying myself. I would be very happy with Joe."

  "You're assuming a hell of a lot, Abby! He just wandered onto the place a couple days ago!"

  He moved away from the intimacy of the bedside, crossed to the two windows and a vacancy of sky in which his emotions dwindled while maintaining status, like a few vigilant stars.