Panama Page 11

  “I just wish out of respect for my investment you’d take the time to let him tell you what you’ve been doing.”

  “Catherine, why do we have to talk about him now?”

  “He’s looking at you.”

  I glanced up and sure as hell.

  “What are you trying to do to my mind?” I inquired.

  “Restore the original luster.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  A member of Jorge Cruz’s orchestra sat at the bar with an uncased yellow saxophone propped next to him, reminding me of my commitment at the Casa Marina. He ordered two shots of Mount Gay Eclipse and began to hum a nervous salsa tune while spying on me in the mirror. With everyone watching me, I began to think of the writer, the one who quit everything to go home so Joe Cain’s widow could show him what was what. I could have gone with him and made a cowboy of myself or merely lived in a way that Jesse James would have understood, or even my grandfather with a cane in his scabbard and his Lucky Strikes and his board-and-batten barn in Excelsior Springs with its lunatic memories of upside-down border fighters.

  I could, in any case, restore myself in the glades I’d loved as a boy, hunting turtles and smelling gunpowder from my .22 instead of trotting the burnt-out nerves of the nation like an adenoidal Basenji. I could stop lying and try to improve my memory without being an utter fool about it.

  Catherine took me to a house on Lopez Lane to carry a lamp home for her. We entered in back beside the cistern under the dogwood lintel and found ten people concluding a coke deal. “It’s only me,” sang Catherine and the deal went on, with a young scientist on a three-beam scale trying to break a little boulder into quarter ounces. I commenced feeling the strain. The subject of the deal was a normal-looking young businessman given away only by half-mast eyes. There was a very tiny girl at the table and she chopped one little nugget on a piece of marble. The businessman rolled a crisp fifty-dollar bill and the girl separated the blow into rails. Ceremoniously the marble slab went round the table, the businessman first, passing his rolled bill, and when it came back to him, the fifty had turned into a one. When Catherine came back into the room with her standing lamp, the businessman was on his feet shouting, “Fuck this noise the deal is off!” At which point the tiny girl produced the fifty and indignantly demanded to know where her one went to. “It’s interest on my fifty,” said the businessman. I put the lamp over my shoulder, swallowed my spit, and headed for Catherine’s house.

  “I was shocked when we went in there and saw what was going on,” said Catherine. “But you stood tall in the face of all that coke.” She was proud of me.

  Once inside Catherine’s house, she reached out, taking me by the front of my shirt. “Let me help you with your little things,” she said and pulled the shirt violently open, shooting buttons around the room. I reached up and pulled the bead chain and saw the shadows of the fan race against the walls. Star holes appeared in my brain pan. I looked down the front of her Cuban blouse and saw a nipple aiming in space with agonizing delicacy. I realized that the crew of the cucumber boat at Mallory dock had been in a position to spot these glands when we had walked—see, I can remember this—and discussed without raving our own lives together in the rooms and corridors of big-city hotels.

  From the bedroom I heard a gruff voice, “Oral love, not that! I’m no shootist!” Catherine jerked open the door and there was Marcelline with the agent, that sight, engaged in a blur of manual intercourse. She shut the door again.

  “Your place,” she said. When we opened the door to go out, there was an intelligent-looking young man poising his hand to knock. “Go to it,” said Catherine to him, “they’ve got the jump on you though.” I had to race to keep up. The breeze poured into my buttonless shirt. “That was the grave robber,” said Catherine. “He had a synthesizer fellowship at Juilliard.”

  “He looks it.”

  “Give me any other century,” she replied. She insisted on making two stops: one to buy an album called Great Waltzes of the World and another for six bottles of Evian mineral water. When we got to my place, we put on the record and danced until we polished off the mineral water. The dog watched the prom from the sunny patio. Playing cards of afternoon light from the kitchen window crawled across the floor until my father’s picture lit up on the wall and I screamed holy murder.

  “I’m getting out of here.”

  “Sit down,” said Catherine.

  “Bugger that, my ears are ringing.”

  “Just calm down, Chet, please.”

  “My father led a long and heroic life at sea and died ironically in a tunnel under the city of Boston instead of at the helm of a schooner as he should have. It upsets me to see his likeness.”

  “Chet, please listen to me quietly. Your father is a happy man from Bunkerville, Ohio, who has made a fortune packaging snack foods. He is here in Key West. He wants to see you.”

  “He was always calling my bluff. He personally manufactured all the small, fine instruments necessary for giving my self-esteem back to the Indians. But he was a durable man of the high seas and it kills me he uh died of uh smoke inhalation.”

  “No high seas, no death. Happy snack-food packager.”

  “Nuts.”

  “True.”

  “Uh-uh, nuts. Can we go in there?”

  “You’re not getting off that way. I’m not interested in going to bed with you five minutes after you’re screaming at a framed portrait.”

  “Do I have to be attractive twenty-four hours a day?”

  “You have to be attractive once in a while.”

  “Oh, brother.”

  “Go for a walk. Calm down. And when you get back, I’ll be waiting for you. I’ll love you and hold you and kiss your eyelids. But I’m learning that I can’t make you better.”

  I knew she would keep her word. So I went outside to collate these mysteries into a uniform package I could live with. This necromancy of Catherine’s in attempting to bring the dead to life was out of the question. I had to decide why she wanted to lie to me about my father. Then I lost control of my feet and found myself speeding along the hedges, shouting, “Coming through!” whenever a knot of pedestrians ambled into my way. Like a heartsick housewife on a shopping spree, I thought an interesting acquisition would divert me from my pinwheeling insides and flying feet. Therefore, on Galveston Lane, I made arrangements to purchase a parrot which said Jesus, Mary, Joseph at the trilling of a bell, the sight of a monstrance or a cracker. We discussed wampum but the Cuban gentilhomme who owned the parrot wanted, I thought, in excess of its real value. I attempted to seize the parrot, having placed an amount equal to the parrot’s real value upon the sideboard. But I was badly bitten by the parrot itself and obliged to beat a hasty retreat.

  I was jumped by photographers in front of Bahama Mama’s, and while a stenographer wrote frantically, I recited my Act of Contrition, genuflecting with enough sincerity that my knee could be heard against the sidewalk a hundred feet away. A photographer leaned in for a close-up and a tourist who had been staring at me, a middle-aged man in a LaCoste shirt, slapped the camera to the street and said to the photographer, “Leave him alone, you god damned ghoul.” Once more my flying feet had me soaring down the island. I found I could knife sideways through streaming traffic without harm and even the shriek of brakes and horns seemed very far away. I could set my nose on the point of a cloud and run navigating the blocks of houses on Whitehead Street until my lungs caught fire and I had to lie down in front of the barbershop. Two men came out in their aprons, vividly black West Indians, and asked me what I was going to do now.

  “Lie here get my wind.”

  “Need’ny hep?”

  “Nope.”

  They went back in to finish their haircuts. I watched the movements of diverted feet as they passed my face until I had my breath. I sat up on my haunches until I could rise with some dignity and angle toward the Casa Marina. Electricity was running up my swollen arches and my bones felt translucent as I
fled toward Catherine in subaqueous strides, eyes hanging low in their sockets and teeth vibrating very slightly against each other.

  More than anyone else, pedestrians and out-of-towners are assailed by the forces of evil. Moving through these hopeless ones, I knew that they would have to go some to help me at all. Everybody has a rough time getting what they come for. The real cowboys are all in drugstores; these people got hung up in the rigging.

  As soon as I got to the house, I could see Mrs. Dean carrying a Portuguese man-of-war to the ocean on a stick. Last fall her Chow ate one and went to his reward making unearthly noises at both ends. She turned her eyes slowly toward me.

  Catherine said, “I can’t rise above it. I can’t stand it.”

  “May I come in?”

  “God, what happened to your head?”

  “I was attempting to purchase a beautiful green parrot.”

  “What happened to your finger?”

  “I fell. No one came to me. I curse this nation.”

  “You what?”

  “I curse this nation. Can you imagine the time I’m having?”

  We went inside. I noted the air of mildew. I am a Floridian and I accept the mildew.

  The first thing I told Catherine was that I was glad the marine biologist knocked his eye out, the one he looked through the microscope with, glad, the rotten one-eyed shitsucking wage ape.

  No reply. I was being indulged. O God, this isn’t funny and only the sonorous, vacant sea gave me any sense of truth, truth in the sense of what was in store: circulating minerals.

  Then I felt horrid again and I wanted a family with Catherine. I wanted us to want the same thing with no hideous discussions of our rights and obligations. I would be Papa Bear and there would be peace, peace in the valley for … for me. And over the chimney, the shimmer of smokeless fuel. There would be rabbits on the lawn in the evening. And Jesse’s saddle horse would be in the tie stall with the morning light on his shining coat.

  “What is this?”

  “A compress. You’ve got an egg on your forehead. Can’t you hit something besides your head? And look at these.”

  She showed me Roxy’s wedding invitations. The party at the Casa Marina was mentioned. I stared at the raised engraving and felt the weight in my pocket. “What’s that noise?” I said.

  “The trash collector.”

  “Jesus, it seems right in the room.”

  “Give me the gun.”

  “It’s mine.”

  “Give it to me.”

  I handed it over.

  “Let me ask you something. Would you consider seeing a psychiatrist?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Why?”

  “They are disease profiteers.”

  “You need help.”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  “As what?”

  “An angler on the sea of God’s mysteries.”

  Catherine fed the dog, turning the can in a patented opener while Deirdre ran around on her hind legs like an exotic dancer. More and more, the gentle movements of the sea had come to sound like hoofbeats. I touched my compress and licked the beak hole in my forefinger. There was a chameleon on the screen puffing his vermilion throat against the wire.

  Then Catherine found my rosary in the margarine tub: “What the fuck is this?”

  “Only at night.”

  “What?”

  “For sleepless nights. Beads, vodka, and walking the dog.”

  “Have you gone down to the pier?”

  “No.”

  “Your father’s boat is anchored there.”

  “Here we go.”

  “Here you go. You ought to have a look. Lot of money in snack-food packaging, by all appearances.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because that is how the boat was paid for and it’s about a city block long. Look and see.”

  I thought that I would try to detail as much of this vapid lie as I could. I laid my plans as I slept on the sea-grass rug. When I awoke, Catherine was gone. There was a salad made for me in the icebox and a loaf of Cuban bread.

  I put on my bathing suit and walked along the beach toward the pier. I made my way around a restaurant whose tables stood empty, legs plunged in sand, unused paper napkins fluttering in an ocean breeze. I had to wade around a piney promontory before I could see the boat. She was anchored about a quarter mile offshore, bow to the southeast trades. This was not the first time I’d been beset by impostors.

  I could tell she was white though it was dark, and the portholes glowed warmly. I slipped into the water and began to swim. I don’t know how long it took. I was not in the best of shape and I was exhausted by the curious morning running across our island town. But I got to the boat, touching its towering bow and holding myself for a rest. Then I let the tide carry me along the hull, through the panels of yellow light, my fingertips gliding over the rough barnacles at the waterline. From somewhere above the rail, I could hear Jesse’s voice; he spoke angrily of the eating habits of Americans, claiming they never knew what they wanted. I knew what I wanted.

  When I got to the stern, I knew for the first time how deep Catherine’s scheming against my sanity had become. Above my head, in enormous brass letters, it said: S.S. SNACK. And directly over the transom, the man I’d first thought I’d heard speaking stood. It was the old man on No Name Key whom I had discovered arranging Catherine’s hair on the mud. He had the cane from my grandfather’s scabbard and he worked it between his two hands as he stared down, down, at me, suspended in a warm ocean. I released my hold on the rudder and let the tide carry me into darkness.

  12

  I STAYED IN BED a very long time. I was not alone. I was very thirsty and drank glass after glass of flat Key West tap water. Thanks to Don. Don filled the glasses from a yellow plastic pitcher as he told me where I had been and what I had been doing. Then an ice cube jammed the spigot and Don, while trying to refill my glass, slopped about a half quart through the top of one of his mesh two-tones.

  “That’s the first thing you’ve done for which you should have been paid,” I said aggressively. “Now let me tell you something. I don’t care what I’ve been doing or whether it was right or wrong because it will all come out in the wash—” Don opened his wallet and let the credit cards plummet from his hand in their accordion plastic enclosure.

  “Take these. You’re broke. You can ruin my credit. My signature is easy to forge. But take these and use up my money until you’re satisfied I’m not in it for the money.”

  “What are you in it for?”

  “Memory. It’s the only thing that keeps us from being murderers.”

  “Well, I don’t have one.”

  “I want to rebuild it.”

  “I don’t want it back.”

  “You must have it back.”

  “Oh, no you don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Telling me god damn you that I can’t proceed without knowing where I’ve been. Don’t pull that old malarkey on me. Where you from anyway? Penciltucky? You god damn spy. Here I am to start with, half frozen, from trying to pay a god damned visit to a very important American citizen—”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Who’s what?”

  “This very important American citizen.”

  “C’mon. You know who it is.”

  “I want to see if you have the balls to tell me.”

  “I can tell you.”

  “Well, tell me.”

  “Who I went to see?”

  “Yeah, who.”

  “Jesse James.”

  “Jesse James has been dead for a century, mister. He was shot by Bob Ford whilst attempting to hang a picture.”

  “Never happened.”

  “I’m telling you—”

  I had to shout. “Bob Ford never got it done.” I calmed myself. “A picture of what?” I then asked.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Jesse James was hanging a picture
of what?”

  “A landscape. Let’s say a landacape of Missouri.”

  “Which would be what?” Jesse owned one picture: a photograph of his horse, Stonewall Jackson.

  “Thickets.”

  “Thickets.” I thought that this was a paltry fabrication.

  “You heard me.”

  “Well, I say he never got shot by Bob Ford.”

  “You want to get smacked? Do you know how ugly it is not to give in to someone trying to save you?”

  “No.” I saw the skinny detective would hit me. He wasn’t man enough for some red-blooded despair.

  Jesse, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

  * * *

  I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my first meeting with Catherine. Do I start on this because the end is in sight? I couldn’t face that; and, in fact, a certain giddy courage accompanies my ever raising the question at all. I don’t think I could survive with less than the hope of a long life under American skies, with Catherine. At the same time, I know that it’s been one crisis after another. But, what of it. We met in a San Francisco pet shop where I had boarded my toucan. The toucan had been mistakenly sold; and since the store smelled of monkey droppings, I accused the manager of incompetence. Catherine watched from a distance, and when our exchange became rather cruel, she began releasing animals; first the gerbils, and working her way up to the primates. She hated meanness and by the time she had averted what had every chance of becoming an ugly fight, there were a number of fanciful creatures, tropical and otherwise, running out the door to disappear among the busy feet of pedestrians. “This,” thought I to myself, “is my kind of girl.”

  There were bills to be paid, after which we adjourned to a Japanese-style restaurant which served Serbo-Croatian food in addition to raw fish and a startling marshmallow salad that was absolutely gratis to anyone who came through the door and braved the wilderness of bentwood coat racks in the foyer. Even there, I was not oblivious to certain family glories of mine, the sound of horses in the underbrush—perhaps “thickets” is not the wrong word—gunpowder in percussion Colts, tired men in their hangouts, haunted Missouri barns.

  Over the top of my salad, I could see faces pressed to the glass amid Japanese lettering.