It would all make sense if I could think it through, but I didn’t want to think it through just then—not while I was lying naked and queasy on her mattress. Above my head, the chain of copper bells stirred in a single spasm.
“So,” was all I said.
Leila lit a cigarette, blew the smoke carefully away from me. We were quiet. Leila asked me nothing more, and for once her lack of curiosity seemed…not indifference, but just easiness, and her sitting there was pleasant, as though for us to stay that way was the right order of things, the order of long custom.
Finally she spoke, “How do you feel?”
“Kind of thirsty.”
She brought me a glass of water. As I drank it, the sun fell like gold dust on Leila’s sandaled foot. It was coming through the very bottom blinds, and the slant of light brought back a memory, throbbing my two new wounds.
“What time is it?” I asked. “Where’s my watch? Look at my watch.” Someone had stacked it neatly on top of my clothes at the foot of the mattress.
“It’s a little after four, why?”
So I had missed it. They were already married. There, at 6:00 now, in some catered Charleston home that I had never seen, Jardin was pushing ceremonial cake into James Dexter’s open mouth as Mama and Colum and Fitzgerald and Maeve agreed to look on. It was all over, and I had missed it. That moment when I was to feel the anguish of loss psychically, instantaneously vibrated to me across two thousand neutral miles, I had passed that moment passed out, and if the psychic sound wave had telegraphed my passive prostrate brain, its message was lost forever. “Jardin’s married. They got married this afternoon,” I said.
“What? Oh, yes…I’m sorry, Devin. Are you upset about it?”
An automatic “yes” was bubbling up, when, inexplicably, it just burst, evanescent as empty air, and I slowly allowed myself to acknowledge that incapacity of the comfort-seeking spirit to sustain its griefs. And finally I answered Leila, “No, I guess really I’m not as much as I thought I’d be.” For it didn’t matter as much as the sting in my groin or the peacefulness of lying there hazy in the filtered sun with her. Slowly I began to admit that Verl had been right all along about Jardin and me. Maybe about James Dexter and all those other theories of his that used to irritate me so much. Perhaps it had taken Tanya to teach me. Mrs. Sirenos and a good right hook. It shocked me to lose grief so abruptly, like a tire blown out. I was already missing the grief as much as I had missed Jardin.
Finally Leila smiled. “I’m glad,” she said. She gave me the rest of my clothes to pull on over my bruises. “Can you get up?”
I left Tanya’s cabin braced on Leila’s arm.
“Devin, if you feel up to it, how’d you like to do me a favor?”
“Sure,” I said, my head swimming like a drunk in a wool suit trying to climb out of a pool.
“I’m worried about Nate. I’m being realistic, and I don’t think he has…I have a feeling he doesn’t have a lot of years left. And the worst thing is that he’s already just given up. Nothing matters to him. I think if we could get him involved in something, maybe it would help. I don’t mean just being nice to him. Sabby’s really helped there already, and you and Joely, and Mother. But something outside of himself, something he can like himself for again.”
“Okay. Like what do you mean?”
“There’s a play he’s mentioned several times, a production he was involved in a long time ago. It seemed like it had some special importance to him. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. I’d like to do it for him, to get him to do it. He needs something. We all do.”
“I don’t know, Leila. People have pretty much had it.”
“Look at us all,” she said. “What’s happened to us? We’re just waiting it out here, no different from Nate, passing the time, dropping away, and we’re getting bored and ugly. Waiting until Bruno tears the place down and puts up a damn supermarket. Or somebody gets drafted or gets married or the world blows up. We were supposed to be a company, people who felt the same way, who wanted to make something come alive. That’s what I thought Mittie wanted. That was the plan.” Slowly, ceremoniously, we walked out of Slough Lane and into the parking lot. “The theater,” she pointed, “even a silly place like this—even an old rollerdrome in the middle of a stupid tourist park—it can be a part of the fight, you know.”
She opened the van door, then suddenly just slid down into the dirt beside it, clutching her huge pocketbook in her arms like a baby and crying. I knelt beside her, holding her until she stopped. “What can I do?” I asked her.
“Help me,” she said. “Help me get the others to try. They probably aren’t going to want to take on anything new. But we should! Not just for Nate, or Mittie, but for all of us.” She pulled herself up. “I won’t let Bruno win!”
I promised her I would try.
She wanted to go home, so I helped her into the van. “Just go home and try to get some rest. It’ll be okay. Thanks for coming to my rescue.”
• • •
In a corner booth of the Red Lagoon Bar, I sat for a long while thinking. If it was all true, then why did I want whatever James Dexter wanted when I believed James Dexter wanted all the wrong things? What did I want?
Sauntering to the bathroom, Spurgeon Debson saw me. He squatted down next to the booth, peered at my blackened, puffy eye. It was the first direct interest he’d ever shown in me. “Pigs?” he asked. “Narcs?”
“Maturation,” I told him.
“Yeah,” he nodded, with all the sad cost of revolutions in his gaze.
“You think you got problems?” Marlin scoffed at my shiner. “Shit! You spent four years behind an ivy wall, Donahue! I got the draft on my ass, and the crabs, and a pregnant girlfriend!”
“Don’t mind him,” Joely said. “He’s been buzzed out on bennies all night.”
“He went around and switched all the nameposts on all the summer houses near Mrs. Booter’s,” sighed Pete Barney wistfully.
“Let no one know who they are! Let nothing in life be certain!” Marlin was high, and spooking me with his wild eyes.
“Listen, you guys,” I told them. “Leila’s had a good idea. She wants us to put on a new play. Cheer us all up. All My Sons.”
“Forget it,” Marlin said. He was watching Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic convention in Chicago on Tony Menelade’s little television set behind the bar.
“Isn’t there any more Calhoun money left?” Pete asked.
Marlin gasped out loud. “I got to get some air!” Tugging itchily at his Levis, he rushed away.
“How ’bout sticking with him, Pete? He’s totally gone.” Pete obligingly chased after Marlin as Joely stood up. He too was walking as bowlegged as Calhoun Grange; everyone had “shaved.” “I have to get back to the theater,” he said. I stayed where I was.
“Serves you right, you little twerp.” Lady Red leaned into my booth and pointed at my eye.
“I beg your pardon?”
She emptied an ashtray into a plate left in front of me and took away my glass. Obviously, it was time for me to leave. As she rang up my check, she told me, “I knew that name was as phony as a grade-B movie. ‘Tanya’! And that story! Ring mark on her wedding finger. You didn’t notice, of course!”
“Slumming it for kicks, that’s what she was doing,” Tony suggested from his stool behind the bar.
Lady Red whirled on him now. “Slumming it! Here? Are you kidding? Those two work a cheap bar in Denver, that’s all. Bullshit, she was running from slums! And that bastard put a lousy dick on her! A lousy dick nosing around in my bar, bothering my girls!”
Tony was being reckless. “Well, she went back with him, didn’t she?”
Red charged him with her raised voice. “You think you know so much? Well, listen, maybe she was a sap, but if I ever go, I go, got it? I don’t get pushed around, you can sure count on that!” She slammed the cash register shut. “We’re closing,” she said coldly.
I left.
Out in the moonlit parking lot, Ronny and Marlin were pissing at one another from a distance of twelve paces.
“Yeah. I’ll piss! I’ll piss right in your eye!” Marlin yelled.
“TRY IT!” challenged Ronny back, gesturing at his open mouth. “Get it in here and I’ll drink it!”
“Jesus, Pete, what’s going on out here?” I asked.
“Marlin insulted Ronny. His…his virility, I guess, and then they started fighting, and then this,” he said remorsefully.
“For God’s sake, couldn’t you stop them?”
“Are you kidding, what could I do?”
Across the creek a dog was barking. Spurgeon’s Great Dane. Maybe we were on his pissing ground. Mad as his master, he charged the bridge and flew at the now-urinating duelists. Marlin, Pete, and I sprinted away, but Ronny stood like a Spartan.
“I hope that bastard gets his balls bitten off!” Marlin called back to us as he fled around the side of the theater. But Ronny raised the Dane, spun him, and hurled him into the creek. Then he crouched, waiting, his arms like prongs, to plunge the dog down when he came back at him again.
“In the name of our fathers and all our sons,” Ronny shouted, while the terrified dog yelped and paddled until he could scramble away and up the other bank. Suddenly, bright headlights shot out from near the bar. A police car had pulled up. Standing, Ronny raised his head into the glare. The sight we then saw was ghastly. Behind us, Gabe Booter, the sheriff, was approaching. Before us, Ronny stared with one rage-mad eye and one empty socket.
“For God’s sake, Ronny!” I cried. “Your eye fell out!”
Oedipus, the Cyclops, King Philip of Macedon, Long John Silver—I glimpsed them all like a nightmare in his very young stonewhite face as he fell frantically to his knees, spinning in a circle of dark dust, looking with his moving hands.