Dragonfly

by Farris, John

  Joe hadn't closed his eyes, either, but he was exhausted from the ordeal of getting them all out of the Barony and into Nimrod's Chapel, once the floodwaters had partly drained from the back roads. Lucas Thomason's four-wheel-drive Dodge truck was the only vehicle operational after the hurricane; the storm surge had carried Frosty Clemons's yellow minivan two hundred yards into the partially cleared lot that was to have been Thomason's practice polo field. But the late Dr. Thomason had chained the rear axle of his pickup to the magnolia tree in the center of the motor court. There was a chain saw in the tool locker in the back of the truck, and Joe had cut a path for the five of them along treacherous roads filled with debris and downed trees. Almost all of the live oaks had survived the hurricane winds, losing limbs but not coming out of the soaked ground; but pine trees and water oaks were piled twenty feet high in places.

  He knew a little about post-traumatic shock syndrome. Abby might come out of it soon, or (there were cases, going back more than twenty years, patients warehoused in VA hospitals) never. He had almost no voice left, but he tried talking to her.

  "The paralysis is going away, Abby. Another week or two, then some time with a physical therapist, you'll be walking again. As well as you ever did. The rest of it—"

  He paused to rub his eyes, to wait for a flicker of understanding in her own wide-awake eyes, as silvery-gray and blank as aluminum in the weak emergency lighting of the hot little room. A casement window was open, water dripped outside; the air smelled of salt and dank rotted marsh. The stars, unmoved by the disasters of a medium-sized planet in what would be, from a different perspective, a galaxy hardly worth mentioning among its titanic neighbors, were bright in a cleared sky. Somewhere a mournful cock was calling for the sun to visit theirdevastation as chain saws coughed and roared spasmodically throughout the town. A National Guard genny pounded away in the parking lot of the regional hospital. Lillian's white head, hairpins sticking out every which way, nodded toward one shoulder, then jerked erect. She smiled meaninglessly, all speckled pink gums behind charcoal lips: her teeth were in a pocket of her dampish shiny dress, spotted in places with pluff mud like a leopard's pelt. She resumed dozing in her chair.

  "As for the rest of it," Joe went on, "I know it will take a while. And probably no one could ever explain why Dr. Luke did this to you. I guess—" His own head nodded from weariness, and he had to think hard about what he, meant to say. "I mean, I know there are feelings that a man has for a woman that are so powerful—if they go bad, they turn into something—as close to evil as human beings can get. And I know—there are lies that can't be forgiven."

  He smiled humbly and reached out to smooth down one of her saturnine eyebrows; his thumb grazed her eyelashes and she blinked, but it was pure reflex. No other muscle moved in her face, as if she had willed herself to follow Dr. Luke's protocol beyond his death. But maybe she truly didn't know about that; another act of the will. As if she had decided to lie in suspension forever, waiting for him to reappear. There was no obvious perspiration, but her skin had a liquid sheen. And a little saliva had trickled down from one corner of her taut mouth.

  Joe reached for a tissue on the bedside tray and wiped it away, feeling a cringing of his heart. "I wish," he said, "I knew how to deal with the feelings I have for you." He smiled again and put a hand over his eyes, holding back tears, tears of repentance and failure.

  There was no place for Walter Lee and Lizzie except in the hot crowded corridor outside the overburdened emergency cubicles. Walter Lee had had his burns treated, and one eye, which had taken ajot of flaming kerosene that resulted in a blistered lid the size of a bumblebee, was covered with a gauze pad and crisscrossed strips of tape. On the little bench they shared Lizzie was hunched up against Walter Lee's side in a cardigan sweater long enough to cover her knees, a nearly-empty can of 7UP in one hand. She looked listlessly at Joe when he came toward them through the seated elderly and the whining children in their mothers' arms. Sweetish medicinals stung her nostrils, and the jaded bouquet of old blood.

  "Abby okay?"

  "Still out of it, Liz. How're you, Walter Lee?"

  "Hongry."

  "Me too," Lizzie said.

  "I wish I could do something about that. There's not even a bag of potato chips left in their vending machines."

  "Thank you, Dr. Joe. We'll be all right. Wonder do the telephones work yet? I need to get in touch with the girls."

  "No, I don't think they're working." They heard the sound of an ambulance pulling up outside under the damaged marquee of the emergency wing. "Walter Lee, we need to talk. It'll take a little while yet, but sooner or later the police will be around."

  "Yes, sir, I expect they will. But what is there to say? I mean, Dr. Luke had a heart attack and died. We all witnessed it."

  "That's right," Lizzie said, looking up at Joe with the cool of a polished liar.

  "Wasn't nothing you could do to save his life."

  Joe sighed. "Maybe you shouldn't jack around with the cops, Walter Lees"

  Walter Lee showed a weary, cynical half-smile.

  "Frost dead. Dr. Luke, he dead. What we got to care about is the living. Get Miss Abby well, on her feet. Sure, they ask their questions. Me, I don't know a thing. What am I supposed to know? I just work for the man, that's all."

  "What am I supposed to know?" Lizzie said argumentatively. "I'm a kid."

  "We bury the dead now, Dr. Joe. We get on with things, best we know how. Miss Abby gone need us. We gone need her."

  "You make it sound so simple."

  "Plenty tragedy to go around, this day. Everybody got their own concerns. All the bad is done with for now. We'll abide." Walter Lee paused, and Lizzie scrunched herself a little closer to his side, her eyes closing. One of his big hands covered her shoulder. He looked up in the poor light with his unbandaged, iodine-colored eye, and offered Joe his other hand.

  "I hope this finds you in agreement, Doctor."

  Joe shook his hand. Walter Lee looked content.

  "What you got in mind for yourself, Dr. Joe?"

  "Well—" They were bringing someone in, quick-time, on a gurney, two paramedics angling the injured man toward an already-occupied treatment room. Joe leaned against the wall to get out of the way. "I think I'll have a drink of water, then find 'a place to sit down and catch a few winks."

  "You done a powerful lot for all of us. That will be remembered."

  "Thank you, Walter Lee."

  After a few moments Lizzie stirred and looked around the bulk of Walter Lee at Joe walking down the hall toward a cooler that dispensed bottled water. He joined the line waiting for drinks.

  "Where did Joe say he was going?"

  "Didn't exactly make that clear," Walter Lee said gently. "You get yourself some rest now."

  "I will." She closed her eyes again, yawning. Walter Lee's chin dropped by degrees toward his chest. Seconds, or perhaps minutes, later, Lizzie gave a start and looked up, bleary-eyed. She looked down the corridor to where she had seen Joe last, in mud-caked khaki clothing taken from Lucas Thomason's wardrobe, patiently waiting his turn in line at the water cooler. He wasn't there anymore. Lizzie frowned. There were a lot of people outside under the concrete marquee, the lights of police cars and ambulance reflecting off the taped glass doors. She thought she saw him, making his way through the milling paramedics and rescue volunteers, hands in the pockets of a hunting jacket, walking away from the hospital. She started again, as if she were about to get up from the bench; then Walter Lee's hand grasped her a little more firmly.

  "No, Lizzie," he said.

  "Joe is—"

  "He figure it be time for him to go, honey."

  "Go where? He could stay with us! Abby needs him."

  "He done her a miracle already. Maybe what he needs now is time to work out his own life, find a direction for himself."

  "Do you think we'll ever see him again?"

  "Can't say."

  Lizzie swallowed a protest and thought spitefully
, as she was to think many times in the coming days of confusion and anxiety over Abby and their temporary homelessness, through two funerals and a police investigation that hit the front pages of newspapers everywhere in the state and made her at least peripherally notorious when school resumed, It isn 'tfair of him. And then as more interesting speculation about the man called Joe whose identity could not be verified came to her attention, her resentment lessened, and she began to fantasize about who he really was. The police, having reviewed the tape found in the camcorder at Adele's side in the only house on the beach not demolished by the hurricane, wanted him, for questioning only; they looked for him, as they looked for the missing Charlene Thomason, but they found neither. It was speculated that Charlene had drowned, one more tragedy not to be accounted for until eventually her fleshless remains might be discovered in a tangle of uprooted trees along the shores of Pandora's Bay, or in the ever-shifting river sands farther inland. As for Joe—he was as elusive as a secret agent, a master criminal… an auroral ghost afloat on solar winds.

  For months, while the cleanup at the Barony progressed (the house and Abby's workroom had to be stripped down to the studs to get rid of the infusion of salt water and pluff mud that contaminated all wood and insulation) Lizzie alternated between nightmares and dreams of a guardian angel who appeared at her bedside and spoke to her in the voice of Joe Bryce, offering solutions for the tribulations of the day she had taken with her to her pillow. In his last appearance the angel, more human in aspect than in earlier dreams but still not fully recognizable, bent to kiss her on the lips, and Lizzie awakened with a sob, a welter of emotion in her nicely expanding breast, a cramped abdomen and fresh blood in her vagina: she was a month from her fourteenth birthday. The mystery of Joe Bryce persisted, but her own interest had begun to wane as the fashions, fetishes, crushes, pubescent intrigues and daily gossip of her first high-school year kept her occupied. Elizabeth Ann Abelard was growing up.

  EPILOGUE

  The snowflakes are perfect.

  The stars are perfect.

  Not us.

  Not us.

  We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts.

  And love the wrong people and die.

  —John Patrick Shanley, Moonstruck

  The Beermans, Jerome and Grace, were from California. They had rented a ten-room villa overlooking Magen's Bay on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands that went for seventeen thousand dollars a month with a two-month minimum during the December-to-April season. The amenities included a full staff of servants, and Joe, who owned a piece of the realty company that had leased the villa to the Beermans.

  After the holiday season was over, the Beermans became bored with the social prospects of the next two months and decided to take a cruise. It was a busy cruise season, and the best of the oceangoing palaces that sailed the Caribbean during the winter were solidly booked. Grace Beerman appealed to Joe, who spent a couple of days prying deluxe accommodations for two aboard a Carnival ship out of an executive of the cruise line. The exec required a promise of some costly favors to be paid at a later date.

  Joe left Charlotte Amalie at the lunch hour on an intensely blue day and drove cross-island to Magen's Bay to give the Beermans the good news in person.

  Jerome Beerman had worked for a couple of hours that morning, and was lying down when Joe arrived. Jerre was a screenwriter who specialized in megabucks action movies. He generally took a year to turn out a hundred and twenty pages of dialogue that contained every conceivable variation on the f-word. For his success in having mastered an art form which, he modestly conceded, ranked well below jailhouse tattoos and the designing of paper airplanes, Jerre was paid in the neighborhood of two million dollars per script. Not counting residuals, which could add up remarkably for movies that grossed—worldwide, baby—half a billion dollars or more, depending on the current appeal of the male sexpot assigned to star in each picture.

  Jerre was a very pale, thin little man with dusty-looking gray hair and a bad case of emphysema; he had begun to smoke at the age of ten. He got around with the help of a portable oxygen pack he wore on a shoulder strap that kept him breathing through nasal cannulae, but in all respects he was as slow as an unwound watch. Grace was in her forties. She wore heels nearly all the time, which raised her to an even five feet. Her body was trim and erect from punishing exercise routines designed by a personal trainer. She had a fetching mane of brunette hair with white streaks that looked painted on. Her face had gone under the knife so many times she now had the glossy puffed-up appearance of the designated robin at a worm farm.

  Grace met Joe at the door of the one-story, Italianate villa, and he bent down to receive the kiss that brushed across his lips in a teasing, soulful way. She was wearing a two-piece skater with a bandeau top over perky breasts that could hang on to the top nicely, without the detachable straps to hold everything up. The short skirt revealed all of her honey-gold thighs. A sheer chiffon shirt embroidered with little golden anchors, which she wore unbuttoned over the white skater, billowed in the trade wind that swept through the front-to-back open gallery of the villa, situated a hundred feet above a private beach and the glittery turquoise sea.

  "You're in time for lunch!" Grace exulted. She was as vital as her husband was drab. She couldn't walk ten feet without throwing in a girlish pirouette. Her hand gestures claimed every crumb of attention from those she worked hard to enthrall.

  "I'm skipping lunch this week," Joe explained. "Too many Christmas cookies."

  Grace presumed to doubt him by pinching him above the beltline.

  "Don't be ridiculous! You're fit as a fiddle. And dear André has gone out of his way in your honor—sopa di yuana, and some of that marvelous keri keri his mother taught him to make. Papiamento is such a fun language. André's been teaching me. Do you speak any Papiamento?" Joe shrugged; a few words. "Come, make me happy for once." She peered at him as if from behind a small cloud that had scudded across her horizon. "You are going to make me happy, aren't you?"

  She was all over him, chatty and affectionate, on their short walk across Italian limestone to the gusty veranda where the oiled teak luncheon table, partially shielded from the wind off the sea by bamboo shades, had been set. A pair of blue-and-red parrots in a cage began croaking for attention as Grace and Joe were seated by a houseboy who had that underlying tone of dark malice which island visitors interpreted as surliness. His attitude was commonplace on all the islands, where the only natural resources were those that drew hordes of white tourists expecting a week or two of fantasy living while being catered to by blacks living at or near the poverty level.

  With no fanfare Joe took the blue envelope containing the prized cruise reservations from a pocket of his linen jacket and laid it before Grace Beerman. She snatched it up and read the good news, which called for another round of kisses—which she left her chair to deliver, wrapping her small strong arms around his neck. For a few minutes she sat in his lap, and they were eye to eye.

  "I don't know how I can thank you," Grace said breathlessly. "Joe, you're straight from heaven."

  "I was happy to find a way to help."

  "Jerre's going to be thrilled."

  "Is he having lunch with us?"

  "Well, you know; it's such a chore to get him to eat anything. And he really spent too much time at the word processor this morning. He said he was on a roll."

  "Good for Jerre."

  Grace disentangled herself and with a sliding of fingertips across his cheek left Joe for her own place at the table. Wine was poured by the houseboy, a Chianti as light and sparkling as the air around them. Grace picked up the envelope again, speculatively.

  "This will mean some shopping. Are you free this afternoon, Joe?"

  "I'm afraid I can't."

  "Oh, damn. I wanted your opinions. You have such good taste, without being at all 'GQ' and fairy-faddish."

  "You have a week before the ship arrives in San Juan," Joe pointed out.

 
"Another day, then. As for tonight—" She leaned forward, elbows on the scalloped top of half-inch glass, hands joined, taut chin on her hands. "Joe, it's been so boring for me since Peg and Hunter left. I mean, without your friends there's just nothing to do here."

  Joe smiled in commiseration.

  "So I thought we might have a wonderful evening, just the two of us. Wouldn't you say our relationship has reached the stage where we don't have to tiptoe around the subject of sensual gratification?"

  "Probably."

  Grace lifted her glass of wine. She had a slightly outthrust, toothy smile.

  "Good. Because my glands are quivering like warm jelly. I am literally desperate to fuck you."

  Joe smiled again, acknowledging her desperation.

  "I can't help wondering howJerre would take it. You and I."

  "Oh," she said, with a little conspiratorial moué, "we've already discussed that. Jerre, as you know—well, what can I say? He's been so gallant about this perfectly awful, tedious business of dying, but dying he is; I've done my best to make him happy, and he's very appreciative. He likes you quite a lot, because obviously you've read a book or two; God, where we come from, nobody can even spell Sartre. You've been a good listener when Jerre's had the breath to talk, and also you've been so, um, maddeningly discreet about not making any moves on me. He suggested just the other night that you're more or less wasting your time with that little real-estate business of yours, that you'd be a natural at the Hollywood game."

  "The Hollywood game is all backhands. I've spent some time there. But I never had much use for trendy restaurants where nobody can get a table unless he tests positive for hubris. I'm not a fire-in-the-belly type. No, thanks, not again."

  Grace brushed windblown hair from her face and said good-humoredly, "I can't believe that someone with your panache can be really happy in what amounts to a tropical ghetto. I've had the sense that there's great sadness in you, Joe. Naturally I want to know all about it. Pillow confessions are so good for the soul."