by Farris, John
"Daddy was right. I never—but I—you see—" She made a difficult effort to compose herself. "You don't know what she's been like, the past few weeks. When she dictates, it's like her brain is all jumbled up, and what's on the tapes is worse nonsense than that Finnegans Wake I had to read in college lit."
"Must be why you can't find the tape the two of you were discussing this afternoon."
"Yes, I'm keeping it from her. Just don't want Abby to know. What would that do to her anyhow?"
"I think you made the right decision, Frosty. What you need to do now is make a decision about me."
Abby called to him again, a certain plaintive longing, that might have been intentional fun on her part, in the two-note extension of his name: Johh-ohhhhhhh.
Frosty said, her words unsteady on a high-wire of emotion, "Her head was whirling all afternoon long. Said to me, 'I think I got a fella.' Don't know when—I seen her this happy." She wiped across her forehead as if cleaning a slate. "Okay. Ten o'clock. You can't come to my house. Daddy would know, and I don't want to upset him worse. I'll come to you." Joe nodded. "Abby put you up at the beach house, she said. This is Monday, so the Sea Turtle be closed. I'll have to locate Reggie. He used to rent a room in town, but now I believe he's staying with some musician friends in a double-wide up around Murrell's Inlet. Better make it ten-thirty, eleven o'clock, I got some driving to do."
Joe put out his hand. Frosty just looked at it.
"No reason for us not to be friends."
"Maybe that comes later," she said.
Chapter Thirty-One
Abby was in conference with one of the gardeners, a technical discussion about how much dolomite to apply to the French hydrangeas to change the soil pH factor and turn a select few of their abundant blooms from blue to pink when they reappeared the following summer. There were sounds of implanted sprinklers gushing to life around the perimeter of Bermuda lawn, and sharp steel blades snip-snapping rhythmically as two more gardeners trimmed ivy growing in a thick spiral around the trunk of a chinaberry tree. Nearby a brown bird settled into the basin of a trickling fountain, puffed out its speckled breast and began beating its wings against the surface of the water like a fat happy child splashing in a wading pool. Still, the wild green of summer seemed to be outliving itself there was, in brilliant mesmerizing distances and cool cloud formations, the sense of another season about to slide into place.
"Lizzie said you had a boat," Joe said, when she smiled to acknowledge him.
"Yes, we do. That was Luke's hobby before he took up polo—and politics. I don't think either of us has gone sailing for at least three years." She looked mildly regretful in recalling this lapse. "Time passes and you somehow forget a few of the things you've always enjoyed. I guess the Wayfarer's in poor shape now. I don't think Luke has been keeping her up, he never mentions her anymore."
"Wayfarer?"
"He wanted to name the boat after me, but I balked. Original, huh? There's probably a million old tubs out there on the briny deep named Wayfarer. Do you know anything about boats?"
"I've been around them for almost half of my life," Joe said. "Let's have a look."
"What's it worth to you?" she said, with a flippant, come-on grin.
Joe leaned over her and past the brim of her new hat and kissed her. Almost upside-down, he murmured, "People will talk."
"I don't care who knows I'm happy. Kissing's funny, isn't it?" He turned his face a little and they were eye-to-eye, the blue and the gray, with little flecks of amber liveliness showing in her irises like the fizz in ginger ale. "I mean, maybe three times in my life I've gotten a real buzzola from kissing. Do it again?"
He did it again. Each of them smiled as their lips touched.
"Your face is turning red," she told him, and blew on his cheek as if to cool it.
"You're keeping me in suspense."
"Buzzy," she said. "Definitelybuzzy, like caterpillars are walking up and down my spine, all the way to the Barrier."
He straightened, and rotated his shoulders to loosen a couple of muscles.
"Sex is funny, too" she said, leaning toward a bush bulky with roses the color of orange marmalade and with a fingernail flicking away a blackly-spotted and withered leaf from an otherwise pristine branch. "What little I know about it."
"What do you know about it?"
"I had a boyfriend, who died. Basically all we ever did was fumble around with each other. I was usually too nervous for it to be very exciting. I watched a porn video once. That was funny; the size of him, he should have been in a circus doing it with ponies. And then it made me so sad I could never look at another of those again. What's great sex like, Joe?"
"Great sex is when you don't feel afterward like you've been changing a tire."
Abby flicked her face in his direction as if at the too-near approach of a stinging insect, then looked away deliberately, her lips drawing tight. "I guess Ididn't ask that question for you to make it sound like a dumb question."
"Maybe I don't know what it is to really make love to someone."
For an instant she saw clearly through what had stymied her, made her half-afraid of his maleness and the physical responses that would come so naturally and urgently from him, and which were beyond her capabilities: the expression mattered, not the mechanics. So much bother about sex. It was neither a circus nor a feat of endurance; loving was all, whatever solutions they applied to their needs. Abby raised her eyes.
"Push me," she said, and when he seemed unsure of what she had in mind, she explained, "The path to the dock is bumpy and I could flip Rolling Thunder, so I need a guiding hand. That's all I meant."
It took Joe the better part of half an hour to untie the rain-toughened sailor's knots and uncover all of Wayfarer, where she sat on blocks and under a zinc roof at the end of a gently sloping launch ramp into Pandora's Bay.
Forty-three handcrafted feet of teak and mahogany, with a classic sheer, cleanly designed and built in the days before fiberglass and Airex and computerized flow patterns. The keel made for the shoal waters of the East Coast, a four-and-a-half-foot draft. Late fifties, early sixties, he guessed. A deck-level center cockpit allowing for a broad clean aft deck and probably generous aft quarters below. She was not suffering too greatly from time ashore. Dry rot was his first concern; aboard the ketch he found a ball-peen hammer in a lazarette tool locker and worked his way carefully around the hull, hearing, in most of the places where he tapped the planks, a reassuring ping of good health. He finished this part of his inspection in an exhilarated mood. It had been more than a year since he'd run his hands across fine wood so beautifully shaped and cunningly fitted. The shipwright was unknown to him, probably long gone from the scene; but his craftsmanship was immortal.
He was sweaty and smudged from accumulated dirt when he dropped down from the foredeck and said to Abby, who had waited with patient good humor for his mania to subside, "Want to go sailing?"
"What? She looks pretty sick to me."
"Three or four days, max, she'll be in her glory again. I'll need some help doing the scut work. There's some pitting in the chrome over the rub points which can be buffed out. The decks have to be sanded and recaulked with black silicon. I need to cut out some bad places around the transom and refit with good mahogany planking. The sails are Dacron and there are spots of mildew, not enough to seriously mar their looks. The diesel is a four-cylinder Perkins that ought to be okay if it was put up properly. I'll need a few things from a good marine-supply store; I think I saw one in town."
"You did. By the Lost Sea Turtle. They're probably closed now, but we can go in the morning. You must really know boats. I'm relieved there's no bad damage I don't feel so neglectful anymore."
Abby stared past Joe at the chop on Pandora's Bay. There was a good wind at his back, where his shirt was wet and sticking to his skin. He heard Lizzie hailing them and saw her heading in their direction with Bruiser keeping her company. In skimpy running shorts and a tank top she showed the fleet finesse
of an athlete; her thin legs looked polished and purposeful as pistons while she ran.
"Paul had a little sailboat," Abby said. Wind tugged at the brim of her hat. "What do you call them, Sunfish? Nothing you'd want to take very far out in the Sound. We'd sail up to the Coosaw, or hug the shore all the way to Fripp Island." She looked up at Joe slowly, as if her mind were being pulled, rudderless, into troublesome depths. "It was such a simple, beautiful time."
The pale yellow hat flew off her head; Joe snatched at it, getting nothing but air. The hat went skittering and tumbling across open ground and into a stand of widely spaced pines as Lizzie and then Bruiser detoured to chase it down. Abby turned to watch, stiffening in her wheelchair as if another convulsion were beginning. Her auburn hair blew into her eyes and looked fiery in the sun that struck her full in the face.
When Lizzie stooped to retrieve the motionless hat, Abby screamed.
"No! No! No!"
Lizzie, her back to them, looked around briefly, then picked up the hat.
Abby turned violently again, facing Joe, looking through him. She pushed a hand up through the hair covering her forehead, exposing the hairline and a long thin scar there.
"Bleeding."
"No, you're not. What is it, Abby?"
She grimaced and slumped forward, still holding her head, lightly rubbing the all-but-invisible scar, as if it were suddenly too tender, after years of dormancy, to stand much pressure.
"What is it, Abby?" Joe asked again.
"I don't know. If I can explain. I felt as if—I was chasing the hat myself. Not running. I was being pulled toward it at terrific speed, fa-falling out of control through black, black space."
"Where did that scar come from?"
"The accident. When I was—run over in Beaufort." She grimaced again, squeezing two tears from her eyes. "It hurts," she complained.
"There aren't any nerve endings in scar tissue," he said, carefully taking her hand away and holding it, looking at the site of the injury. From the size of the scar it had been a shallow tear, but scalp wounds could produce a frightening quantity of blood.
"That's all you remember?"
"Yes," she said, cold and trembling. "Make it go away, Joe."
"Make what go away?"
Lizzie came up to them slowly, holding the hat, her cheeks brick red from exertion, sweat in the hollows of her eyes. She had a spot of dried peanut butter at one corner of her mouth.
"Abby?"
"I'm all right, sugar."
"Here's your hat."
Abby shook her head, not looking at either of them.
"Thank you. I don't want it anymore. It's b-bad luck. I shouldn't have been wearing that hat. Because then it wouldn't have happened. I would have seen it coming, and I could've stopped it."
Her voice, compressed by grief, was so small and tinny it might have come from the mechanical voicebox of a doll. Lizzie looked at Joe, startled and upset. He smiled reassuringly at her, and squeezed Abby's limp hand, trying to bring some warmth and life to it.
"You don't have to think about it now."
After a few moments Abby cleared her throat. "I'm not thinking about it. It's just there. Like superstition: nothing to see, just something to fear."
"A daymare," Lizzie said in a fragile voice, then made an attempt to smile. She put her own hand on Abby's shoulder, then in an agony of compassion embraced her cousin, her forehead against the back of Abby's neck.
Sounding more like herself, Abby said, "I haven't had a drink for three or four days. Would one drink hurt me?"
"I'll okay that," Joe said.
"You don't have to mother me, Lizzie."
"I'm not, and shut up," Lizzie said, clinging to her.
"Luke and Charlene are doing some kind of charity thing tonight. Why don't we take Joe to the Skipper's for dinner?" She looked up at Joe, revived by the prospect of an outing, eyes losing their pall. "It's this unbelievably tacky place on Calisto, up on stilts beside a creek, and you think it's going to fall down when the wind blows hard. Pitchers of beer and lobsters so big they serve them with a chain saw. We'll have a party. And Lizzie, guess what? The Wayfarer's going to sail again, thanks to Joe."
Chapter Thirty-Two
When Frosty Clemons came impatiently out of the house to find out what progress Walter Lee was making, she saw that he had removed what might have been the guts, kidneys and liver of her minivan (for all she knew about it) from beneath the hood and spread everything on a square of paint-clotted old tarp protecting the floor of the carport. He was washing parts of this and that in a coffee can filled with naphtha, holding up to his work light and examining with a leisurely eye each newly cleaned piece of metal.
"Brought you a cold drink," she said, setting the can on the plastic seat of a child's play chair.
"Uh-huh."
"Kids are settled down, but not asleep yet."
"Okay."
"What's that you got there in your hand?"
"Fuel injector."
"Did I tell you I needed to be out of here forty-five minutes ago? What about that leak you said I had made the temperature shoot up?"
"Hose clamp. I fixed it. Frosty, there's two kinds of automobile batteries nowadays. The kind you just leave alone, and the kind you need to add water now and then."
"Oh. Which one do I have?"
"Add water."
"I suppose that's not working either."
"No, your battery's okay. Only three of the cells were dry. But that's why she was hard to crank."
"So when can I have my van back?"
"Give me about another hour and a half."
"Huh!"
Walter Lee looked up at her from the padded mechanic's dolly he was sitting on, wiped his hands on some waste and massaged an aching knee.
"Long as I'm about it, might as well give you a regular tune-up."
"Daddy, when you go to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy, do they do a heart transplant at the same time, in case you might be needing a new heart someday?"
"Seems to me you complained all last week how you were stalling out on idle, had to keep giving gas at a red light with your foot on the brake?"
"I guess I did," she said with a shrug, and looked at Walter Lee's car, a twenty-year-old Chevy in need of a paint job that was parked under the buzzing streetlight by the front gate. "I know you had a long day, and I appreciate you paying attention to my van. Maybe I could borrow your car for the night?"
"Help yourself. I ain't going nowhere except to bed." He reached for his Pepsi and drank half of it in three swallows. "Where you off?"
"Oh, Reggie and me are cooking something up for Saturday night at the Sea Turtle. It's extra bucks, Daddy, and I need music in my life."
"How far you going? Maybe you better put gas in." He reached into a side pocket of his overalls and tossed her the keys.
"I'll fill it up," Frosty promised. She went back into the house for her purse. She listened for sounds of activity in the twins' room, heard nothing suspicious, and left quietly. In the carport she gave her father a kiss on his rugged forehead. "Look for me around midnight."
The paint job on Walter Lee's car had oxidized to a pale sage green, and there were places covered only by gray primer where he had plugged holes and filled in dents. Not much for looks, but the sedan was tidy inside and the engine, after starting, was as quiet as a fine watch. But she knew from the other times she'd borrowed it the Chevy was a gas hog, even with its engine tuned.
Awtry Avenue, the street on which Frosty lived with the girls and Walter Lee, dead-ended at a slough off the Corday River. In the other direction, at the corner of Awtry and Second Street, several blocks from downtown Nimrod's Chapel, there was a Church's Fried Chicken on one corner, the Deliverance AME chapel diagonally opposite, a vacant lot that contained several cars and a couple of trucks with sun-faded FOR SALE signs behind the windshields and, across from the unlighted lot, on the northeast corner of Second Street, a convenience store that sold a cut
-rate brand of gas called Zoom!
There was a blinking red light at the four-way stop.
Frosty paused in Walter Lee's Chevy for a camper with Maryland plates to go by. She glanced at the collection of vehicles on the informal used car lot. Most of them had been there for a while, getting dirty and an old but apparently well-cared-for pickup that faced the intersection, parked with its bumper at the edge of the narrow sidewalk. Black, with a long, pointed hood, and, surprisingly, tinted windows, a customized touch. She wondered if Walter Lee had seen it yet. He might be interested. She'd have to mention it to him, although there was no sign visible with a number to call.
Frosty crossed Second and turned right onto the concrete apron of the convenience store, pulled up to the pump that dispensed regular leaded. She added ten gallons, put up the nozzle and hose and went inside the convenience store to pay.
The franchisee of the Zoom! outlet was also the minister of the AME church, who had seven children. Five of them worked at the convenience store on a rotating basis. Frosty knew them all. Tonight Zach was behind the counter, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and dark trousers. He played several musical instruments and had recently moved up from the teen choir to the adult choir. He had a fine baritone voice.
"How're you tonight, Frosty?"
"Right as rain, Zach." In truth she had a tension headache, and she suspected, from a cramp she'd had earlier while dressing to go out, that she was about to get her period.
"That's pump number four? Be twelve dollars and twenty-one cents."Frosty made a face. Zach said with a quick sympathetic smile, "It's mostly taxes, you know. Daddy says we got to pump nine thousand gallons a week to show a profit outside. Inside sales are what keep us in business. Anything else for you tonight?"
"Pack of this Wrigley's spearmint." Chewing gum helped her cope with tension. There was a box of tampons in the van, but she didn't want to go back for it. She dug down to the bottom of her purse and found a lone tampon in its wrapper. Now or later? she asked herself.
"That's seventy-eight cents, so your total with tax is thirteen-fifteen." Zach made change for a twenty.