Closer than ever now.
Who did absolutely nothing for each other: Yellin pulling Mrs. Ted Bliss into what were for her uncharted but thoroughly buoyant waters; Mrs. Bliss reciprocating with an openness so total she might well have been dealing in the naked heart-to-heart of a child with an imaginary friend. And, as in such friendships, they often arranged strange adventures — journeys and tasks neither would have undertaken on their own. Of course, Mrs. Bliss reasoned, she at least had been preparing, training for, and, in a sense, behaving in such “public” ways since coming to the Towers almost thirty years earlier. For what had those demonstrations and makeovers been that she and the other tenants had gathered on the decks of the rooftop swimming pools to witness and participate in? What had the tango lessons been? The lectures and language classes? The Yiddish film festivals and landscape painting courses? Las Vegas and Monte Carlo nights? The good neighbor policy and international evenings? What had all those participatory crash courses in winning bridge, golf, tennis, and chess and even deep-sea fishing instructional programs amounted to, finally? Well, not to very much because for all the initial enthusiasm — Mrs. Bliss did not exempt herself — these courses of study may have elicited, few who signed up for them (and paid their good money) persevered long enough to earn their merit badges.
And it was just this, Mrs. Bliss saw (and explained to Junior Yellin), that as much as age was at least part, and maybe most, of the cause that had contributed to the breakdown and deterioration of what could only be called “the spirit of the Towers.”
“Well, sure,” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, “what then? You don’t see that even the dumbest of us didn’t understand we were barking up the wrong tree? A person don’t take up chess, deep-sea fishing, and the tango just because there’s a sign-up sheet in the game room. You got to have a better motivation than that. You got to have a calling. You ask me, the recreational therapeusisists have it bass ackwards. Fresh interests in life? Who has the time? All right, okay, we got the time. We do. What’s missing is the energy. Piecemeal, this has to have its effect. Piecemeal, this has got to lead to the conclusion that no matter how hard you work you’re never going to be any according to Hoyle or Bobby Fischer or Gussie Moran. Piecemeal, you lose the will to put in the time practicing or do your homework or just show up for the weekly meetings. There ain’t enough left in the class to make up a pair for what would have been the gala at what would have been the end of the term.
“So this is one of the ways the neighborhood changes and gets to put a damper on the spirit of the Towers.”
The old therapeusisist blushed.
“Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “with you it’s only business. You’re no more to blame than the art teachers and French cooking specialists we used to bring in. It wasn’t their fault we dropped out like flies.”
“Because,” Junior Yellin said shyly, “it just so happens I’ve taken up an interest of my own. I read an article about it in the Sunday paper. It was very interesting. Right, you might say, down my alley.”
“What?” Dorothy asked.
“I read up on it first.”
“What?” she said. “What?”
“In fact, I thought it might be something we might do together. We’d get some fresh air out of it if nothing else and, if we ever got lucky, maybe something even more substantial.”
“What already? What?”
Then he told her about the metal detector. His trip to the library to see could he find them evaluated in back issues of Consumer Reports, Consumer Guide.
“You’d be surprised, they can be very complicated. Did you know that they work by means of radio waves? I mean, when you come to think the whole planet’s like some enormous orchestra that plays this ongoing set that never takes a break. It just keeps on blasting out the music of its treasures — all its locked-up silvers and golds and other precious metals. All its buried iron-padlocked chests and trunks, caskets and hidden, bundled safes. Earth’s hush-hush, top-secret knippls and pushkes.”
His voice was hoarse, his eyes wide and oddly lively, as if his pupils had been dilated. He was as excited as she’d ever seen him. No, he had never been so excited.
“You’ve seen them. Haven’t you seen them, Dorothy? Old guys in the park in the grass combing the lawn as if they were sweeping it with a broom or going over it with a vacuum cleaner?”
“Sure,” she said, “I always wondered what they found. Bottle tops, beer cans, old tins of Band-Aids?”
“Oh, no, Dorothy,” Junior Yellin said. “There’s caches of valuable stuff everywhere, the world littered with stash like carpet laid down by pirates. Rare coins and crashed ransoms, stolen goods like a scavenger hunt dreamed up by gangsters.”
“It was a hobby, a fad,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “You don’t see it no more so much.”
“What, are you kidding me? Maybe up north, maybe the fields are played out in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but down here, down here it’s still practically a natural resource. Only cordless phones outsell the metal detector in the greater Miami Radio Shacks.”
“This is true?”
“Cross my heart.”
“I don’t see it so much no more,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
“You don’t see it so much no more because you don’t get out so much no more.”
“I get out.”
“Where? To a Jewish-style restaurant for the Early Bird special? To the movie in the strip mall for the rush-hour show? Where, where do you go, Dorothy? When was the last time you been to the beach?”
“I got a pool on the roof, what do I need the beach?”
“Entirely different story.”
“What, I should lay in my bathing suit on a blanket in the sand with a portable radio? A woman my age?”
“I’m not arguing, I’m just saying. Anyway, don’t change the subject, I want you to come in on this with me.”
“Come in on this what?”
“Metal detectors. What else have we been talking about?”
“Oh, Junior,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “I think you got a bug up your ass with these metal detectors. If you want one so bad why don’t you just go out and buy it?”
Here Junior Yellin looked down at his shoes. Suddenly, and to his great disadvantage, he seemed years younger, almost childish, the expression on his face at once sheepish and serene and, for Dorothy, triggering vague memories of if not of similar occasions then at least of times when she had seen this peculiar amalgam of defeated triumph and victorious shame, the scared pyrotechnics of someone narrowly escaping a threat to his life, say, like someone getting away with murder in a near fatal collision of his own making. It was, Mrs. Bliss realized, the look of one whose prayers have been undeservedly answered.
“Well,” he said, looking up, “you know me, Dot. I always feel I have to have a partner.”
It was true, and she suddenly remembered the look. It had been there when old man Yellin bailed him out after Junior had worked over Ted’s books, and there it was again when his father had settled his gambling debts, all the times he had sprung to his son’s defense, made good on his losses, the thriving, striking codependency of his thievery, principle standing firm in the defense of what was only finally family. Yes, it was true. He had needed partners. Ted. The Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Consultants gang. Even, for a time, Hector Camerando, whose name he did not know and refused to hear. And now Mrs. Ted Bliss.
“Are they very dear?” she asked.
“No, no, not at all. There’s different models of course. There’s low end and high end, but they’re all pretty reasonable. They go for between thirty-nine to a hundred ninety-nine dollars. There’s a good one put out by Radio Shack for about eighty-nine dollars.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Sensitivity,” he said. “You’re paying for power. The cheaper ones usually just pick up iron, the pricier jobs have a finer discrimination. But even the eighty-nine-buck jobs work in up to two inches of water.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“Fools rush in, Dot.”
“If we do this,” said Mrs. Bliss, “what would we be looking for?”
“Like you said, the sky’s the limit, kid.” He looked at her solemnly, levelly, and uttered the remark as soberly as if he were offering inside information.
What he couldn’t know, of course, was that Mrs. Bliss had no use for inside information, or for his project, or even (it could have been the differential in their ages) for the limitless opportunities of young Junior’s sky. If she did this thing she would do it, quite simply, because, as he said, he needed a partner. He’d been a baby even when he was a young man. Now that he was an old one he was an even bigger baby.
Not for old time’s sake, not because he was one of the last direct living connections to her dead, beloved husband. Not out of sentimentality, and not out of any need for companionship, but simply because he was too used to his character and, partnerless (though much of his banter with Nathan Apple was pure snow job, he’d been caught at least a little short by her refusal to allow him to move in with her), he would flounder and wither and die.
She made a further show of interest by throwing faint demurrers in his path.
“Oh, no, Dorothy, quite serious people are engaged in this activity. Policemen in police departments hunting spent bullets and shells, actual murder weapons — guns, knives, and hatchets.”
“I hope we don’t find anything like that.”
“And lose out on the reward money?”
“Just the same,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
“Treasure hunters,” Junior mused. “Archaeologists. Prospectors.”
At Yellin’s insistence they bought two devices. So they could halve the size of their sites. So they could double their efficiency. Nor was he content to buy one of the cheaper models. He argued more bang for the buck and quite agreeably forked over two hundred dollars for Radio Shack’s deluxe detector. Mrs. Bliss, who felt she’d done her part by agreeing to go in with him in the first place, was not to be bullied into buying something beyond her price range. This was Junior’s hobby-horse, not hers, and if he chose to ride it in some Cadillac of metal detector, Mrs. Bliss was content to go with a perfectly serviceable Buick LeSabre. She bought the one for eighty-nine dollars, batteries not included.
Despite what he’d said she had no idea how the things worked, so naturally she was a little surprised when he came by for her that first day in one of the various off-road vehicles to which he seemed to have such unlimited access. He handed her a trowel, a small shovel, a sort of short-handled hoe.
“What’s this?” Mrs. Bliss asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Yellin said, “we’ll settle up later.”
“No,” she said, “what is this? We’re digging a garden?”
“A treasure garden, what else?” Yellin smiled. “What, you thought this was a magnet? That all you have to do is run it over the ground and it picks stuff up like a Hoover?”
As a matter of fact that pretty much was what she thought and, feeling how foolish she must seem to him, blushed.
Junior grinned and tried to explain how the metal detector was actually a kind of transmitter that sent out waves. These were amplified, converted into signals that were then reflected back to the instrument. Listening to him, hearing him out, patiently trying to absorb the information he attempted to hand down from the superior heights of his male, mechanical inclination and intuitions, Mrs. Ted Bliss gave up years, returned in seconds to the trusting, contingent condition of her brief girl- and maidenhoods, her extensive marriage, much of her almost as extensive widowhood. Yellin might have been some faintly ill-willed Manny teaching her the art of balancing checkbooks, the two DEA agents violating her husband’s car, Holmer Toibb giving her homework assignments, a Hector Camerando laying down the who’s whos and what’s whats, or Alcibiades Chitral describing for her the limits of her humanity. He might have been Rabbi Beinfeld alerting her to bold, arcane death escapes, tricks of the trade. He might, God bit her tongue, have been a sort of Frank, or for that matter, any man who’d ever rushed in to instruct her — even her beloved Ted.
Junior Yellin was like any other man. She was old, and couldn’t hurt his feelings.
As Yellin explained she remembered the year in Michigan, the last time she’d been a farmer. Well, farmer’s wife, actually, with her chores (which she didn’t mind) and discomfort (which she did), and proposed that she first go upstairs to change into more suitable clothes.
“But you look fine,” Junior objected, anxious to start.
“I thought it was magnets,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I thought it would be more like fishing than digging and pulling.” Before he could object further Mrs. Bliss turned and walked back into Building One. Upstairs, she improvised a costume she thought more suitable for the work that lay in front of her. She exchanged her wedgies for a pair of Isotoner slippers and took off her polyester pants suit and put on a long, loose-fitting sun dress with a white blouse. She found some light cotton gardening gloves (from her days as a landlord’s wife), and finished off her outfit with a big, white, wide-brimmed straw hat beneath which she fitted a large silk scarf that she drew down the sides of her face and tied under her chin.
“Excuse me, Dorothy dear,” Junior Yellin said when she returned to the strange vehicle, “but you look like a fucking beekeeper.”
Because even though she’d lived in Florida for all these years she was terrified of the sun.
As frightened of it as one living above a fault line, or on the side of a dormant volcano, or in the direct path of tornado activity, the Florida sun an object of dread and superstition to her, some poisonous sky augury like an ominous arrangement of planets. Moving to Florida had been her husband’s idea and, when they first started their forays into Miami Beach back in the fifties, often with other couples and always over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, the winter warmth after the bitter Chicago cold had been an agreeable novelty. During the days they shopped or played cards under immense beach umbrellas and ordered sandwiches and bottles of pop from the towel boys. At night they shuffled from hotel to hotel catching the shows, Sophie Tucker a headliner, Jack Carter, Myron Cohen, Buddy Hackett. They were hardly aware of the sun and, after the first time or two when one or another of the group suffered bad sunburns, they gradually learned to budget the time they spent outdoors, which hours of the day were the safest to go.
Living there all year round was something else altogether. You made a different accommodation, an accommodation, Dorothy understood, which was no accommodation at all but more like surrender, as one’s life in an inner city, say, would be like surrender, a life that couldn’t be budgeted, lived around the times the hooligans were not in the streets, but had to be plunged into daily and at all hours, inescapable as air. Unless you turned yourself into a kind of invalid.
As I have, I have, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, astonished at herself, to realize what she was doing even as she permitted herself to be helped into Junior Yellin’s borrowed dune buggy. This was one of those machines that tended to tip over. She had seen a story about them on “60 Minutes,” how their odd centers of gravity made them dangerous to ride in. With their twin roll bars the machine looked vaguely like a stripped Conestoga. Dorothy at eighty-two and Junior in his late seventies had, between them, to be at least one hundred sixty years old. To anyone who saw them riding in such a young person’s toy they would seem ridiculous.
Yet it was neither her queer appearance (dressed “like a fucking beekeeper”), their ridiculousness, nor the clear and present danger the dune buggy represented that terrified Mrs. Bliss; it was its topless nakedness, its awful exposure to the sun.
She didn’t fear cancer, and after all these years felt herself immune to the danger of a bad burn. It was just that she knew (as a lifetime ago her parents had been anxious at the proximity of Cossacks) that so close to the sun, taking its direct hits as one might take “incoming” in a fierce battle in war, she was in the presence of the enemy. That she was willing to go on with their ludicrous expedition was an indication of just how far she had come, strayed, from her life.
She’d thought there’d be someplace they could go to try out their equipment, imagining something like a driving range or the big empty parking lots and lightly traveled roads where Ted had taken the children when he taught them to drive. Yellin had different ideas and as soon as he could pointed the big clumsy dune buggy toward a long stretch of occupied beach where bathers lay about on blankets taking the sun. (She did not worry about them or project any of her own private fears onto their situations. Indeed, had this actually occurred to her, it would have amounted to an invasion of their privacy, crazy, like someone frightened of elevators warning people away from them in department stores.) It may have been the open car in combination with the vast sandy beach, all that fearful light burning up the sky. Whatever it was, Mrs. Bliss was very nervous, almost carsick.
“Slow down, slow down,” she pleaded.
“I’m not even going twenty miles an hour.”
“There’s children,” she said, “there’s people on blankets.”
“Relax. You don’t think I see them?”
“You’re knocking my kishkas.”
“We’re almost there.”
“Where?”
“I’m looking for a spot. Don’t you think I know what I’m doing?”
If he were looking for a spot, Mrs. Bliss didn’t know how he’d ever find it. God knows where they were. All she could see on her right was open ocean, on her left a bright but bland skyline of beachfront high rises and motels. They bumped along in a sickening no-man’s-land of sand and sun and sky. She didn’t know whether they were still in Miami Beach, or even in Dade County. They might have been in Fort Lauderdale or any, to Dorothy, of the nameless suburbs that had risen beside the coast like a kind of urbanized landfill.
She wished he would stop the car and then, quite suddenly, he did.
“We’re there?”
“Didn’t I tell you?”
He was bullshitting her, but he’d stopped driving and she forgave him. She climbed down out of the dune buggy and immediately felt less exposed to the sun, her stomach still queasy because they were still squarely on the beach in what was not quite yet the middle of the day.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Yellin said. “You’re thinking how is this spot different from any other spot on the beach.”
“I am thinking that,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
“It’s got the proper ratio of sunbathers to swimmers. It doesn’t seem to be all played out, worked over by other metal detectives. I like the demographics.”
“The demographics,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“Hell yes. Superb demographics. Terrific demographics. Wonderful distribution of yuppies, the recently retired, and old folks. White people, coloreds.”
“Please,” she said.
“You think I’m depending on just that two-hundred-dollar gadget I sprang for? Don’t underestimate me, Dorothy. In this business you got to have a dowser’s heart. Let’s set up.”
Dorothy read to him from the manual as Junior poured out parts from the box holding her metal detector onto a sheet and began to assemble it. He was wonderfully efficient and often went on to the next step while Mrs. Bliss, trying to absorb what she had just read, fell behind. If she lived another eighty-two years, she thought dispiritedly, she’d never get the hang of mechanics. Always she’d believed this was some man/woman thing, but Mrs. Bliss was aware that fresh returns were still coming in from the feminists and the fact was she was more than a little annoyed with herself.
Junior fit the batteries into Mrs. Bliss’s metal detector and pronounced it ready to go. First, though, he would have to put his own together. At more than twice the price of Mrs. Bliss’s, Yellin’s metal detector seemed at least three times more complicated, and now when she read the directions to him he frequently stopped her and asked her to repeat what she’d read. At other times he grabbed the manual out of her hands, checking to study it himself or maybe to see if she’d read it correctly. Mrs. Bliss, already upset by the brightness of the sun, began to transfer some of the anger she’d been feeling about herself onto Junior. The metal detectors should have been assembled before they’d left. Even if he didn’t do it at home he’d have had plenty of time while she was in her condo changing her clothes. At least to get started. Whose idea was this? It wasn’t hers. He should have taken the responsibility. What did she think she was doing, anyway? Yellin was Ted’s buddy, not hers.
“All right,” he said at last, “that’s it. Let’s rock and roll.”
Mrs. Bliss, sick to her stomach, thought he sounded like a fool.
She was, kayn aynhoreh, a healthy woman. Indeed, the last time she remembered feeling nearly so ill had been the hot day she’d left Holmer Toibb’s office and was spotted by Hector Camerando as she waited for her bus and he’d offered her the ride. She’d been breathless, disoriented. That had been about treasure, too. Her conviction that they would round a corner and come upon Ted’s Buick LeSabre, reborn, gleaming at the curb as the day he must have first seen it in the showroom. When she saw it was Camerando’s Fleetwood Cadillac she couldn’t catch her breath and started to cry. She felt faint and Camerando had drowned her in air-conditioning. He advised, she recalled, not to let things slide, to see a doctor.
Well, she was with one now, wasn’t she? And knew he would fail her. As all doctors ultimately failed all patients. As Toibb before him, as Greener Hertsheim before Toibb, all the way back to the experimental research scientific ones at Billings, and Rabbi Beinfeld, and good old Dr. Myers before all of them. Nobody, she thought, could help anyone really. It was nobody’s fault. Help just wasn’t in the cards. The cards? The deck!
What she did now, she saw, was for herself. Not for auld lang syne, or Ted, or companionship in her old age, and not, finally, because Junior Yellin might wither and die if she rebuffed his attentions and kiddy enthusiasms, but out of her own needs, her own kiddy enthusiasms that until a few moments ago she still believed — in spite of the presence of the shadeless, roofless ruthlessness of the overbearing sun and the distant twitch of a returning interest in interest (fresh interests lay at the heart of recreational therapeusis; she’d known that going in), in spite, too, of her dissipate concentration over the incomprehensible chop suey of the owner’s manual, and her patient rereadings of the most pertinent sections — applied and that she felt, up to that raw moment when Yellin slapped her hands away and pulled, ripped, the owner’s manual from them. As if he were denouncing her, as if he were saying, “This is the owner’s manual, I am its owner!”
So the shoe was on the other foot. What, he was doing her a favor? Leading her into direct sunlight, dragging her beneath its spooky field as if under some cruel astrological influence. She no longer cared that he was too used to his character, or that he’d always had partners, projecting her anger where if properly belonged — Rage to Bliss to Yellin like a double-play on her husband’s radio.
The more she thought about it the madder she got. The nerve of that guy! Snatching the book away like I’m not even here, like I’m invisible. To hell with him. To hell with him!
And gathering up her metal detector, her trowel and shovel and hoe, and taking her fine paleontologist’s brush made off down the beach on her own, passing by groups of discrete populations — couples from the hotels stretched out on bath towels; women older than Dorothy on beach chairs of bright woven plastic, indifferent as stylites, their skin dark as scabs; men, the ancient retired, chilly in suits and ties; girls in thong bathing suits, their teenage admirers trailing behind them like packs of wild dogs; kids, overexcited, wild in the surf, their parents frantically waving their arms like coaches in Little League; waiters, kitchen help, and housekeepers on smoke breaks; small clans of picnickers handing off contraband sandwiches, contraband beer; lovers kneading lotions and sunblock into one another’s flesh like a sort of sexual first aid. Mrs. Ted Bliss, like some fussy fisherman, as inconspicuously as she could moving past these people toward a yellow patch of empty beach, for all her stealth reminded that she must appear at least as idiosyncratic (though not nearly so fashionable) as the girls in the thong bikini bathing suits, at least as idiosyncratic (though, again, not nearly so fashionable) as the superannuated gentlemen in their tight shoes, suits, and ties — a little old “fucking beekeeper” lady and her electric broom.
Somewhere in a narrow clearing between low and high tides she set up shop, took a last look at the directions to see how one turned on the machine, flicked its toggle switch, and opened the store.
“What are you doing?” a little girl of eight or nine asked about ten minutes after she started.
“Looking for buried treasure, sweetheart,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
“Did you find any?”
“So far,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “they’re not biting.”
“Oh,” said the kid, “may I try?”
“Be my guest,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“Really? No fooling?”
Mrs. Bliss handed the metal detector to the little girl.
“What do I do?”
“Make little half circles.”
“Like this?”
“Looks good to me.”
“This is fun,” the child said in a few minutes without really meaning it.
“Take your time, darling.”
Mrs. Bliss watched the little girl, self-consciously comparing her to her own children when they were her age, to her grandchildren, their children, her sisters and brothers at that age, ultimately to what she could remember of herself when she had been nine. Drawing a blank here, recalling as through the vague narcotic muffle and babble of an interrupted dream only the interest she’d had in detail, the remarkable sum of unrelated parts, a sort of silly wonder and flawed attention. She was sorry she didn’t have an orange in her purse, or candy, or gum to give the kid, anything, really, to keep up her flagging interest. Suddenly, inspired, she reached into her change purse, found a quarter, put it back, and took a dollar out of her billfold.
“Here,” said Mrs. Bliss.
The look on the little girl’s face changed from the curiosity and enthusiasm she’d shown when she’d initiated their conversation to that of suspicion, almost alarm.
“It’s your treasure,” Mrs. Bliss started to explain, but before she was sure the words were out of her mouth or, if they were, whether the child had heard or understood them, the kid dropped the metal detector’s long handle down on the sand and ran off.
“What was that all about?” said Junior Yellin, coming up to her.
“Oh,” Dorothy said, “oh.”
“What’s up? What’s wrong?”
“I scared her. I tried to give her a dollar.” Mrs. Bliss was almost in tears.
“You scared her? You tried to give her a dollar? To hell with her. She can go to hell.”
“She thinks I’m a witch out of some fairy story,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“Let her go screw herself she thinks you’re a witch. She’s a son of a bitch. So what did you find?” She was thinking about the little girl. She didn’t understand what he meant. “Hey,” Junior said, “she threw it on the ground. What does she think, it’s a toy? It’s an advanced piece of machinery, it isn’t a toy.”
“It’s a toy,” Mrs. Ted Bliss said.
Yellin looked around to see if anyone were watching. “Look,” he said, “look inside.” He was wearing a sort of creel. He raised its lid. Inside, dark at the bottom, Mrs. Bliss saw that he carried a kind of loose, unset metal jewelry.
“You found these?”
“Shh. Yes. And more, but people were getting curious so I kicked sand over the area and came to look for you. I took coordinates. I could find the spot again anytime I wanted to.”
She’d forgotten the little girl. “What do you think it is?” she asked.
“A battle, what else?”
“A battle?”
“A battle, a shoot-out, a fistfight with guns.”
“On the beach?”
“On the beach? The beach? Dorothy, darling, this is the hallowed ground of drug lords. Just look at these shell casings, will you; look at all these bullets. I don’t know my ass from a hole in the ground, millimeter and NRA-wise, but I’m telling you, kid, this stuff has all the markings of Uzis, AK-forty-sevens, rubber landing craft on moonless nights. Cocaine-wise, it must have been the Bay of bloody Pigs. I was a butcher, I know.”
“It’s ammunition?” Mrs. Bliss asked nervously.
“It ain’t arrowheads.”
“But what do you do with it?”
“What, are you kidding me? We could open a smuggler’s museum. We don’t have enough yet. Anyone can see it’s just the tip of the iceberg, but we can always come back. I mean, I know where the mother lode is. Hell, Dorothy, there must be a couple hundred dozen mother lodes up and down all these beaches. And let’s say I bring some of my Land Rover chums in on this. And you’ve got an in with the DEA guys. Working together with our friends downtown and if we put in a little research on the mainframe, we should be able to establish the like provenance of these drug wars, the circa and circumstances. I mean, face it, what’s a tourist do with his time after he’s checked out South Beach and been to Little Havana? He wants the big picture on the culture his next stop has to be the Dope Runner’s Museum. What do you say? I’m offering you the ground floor. What do you say, what do you think?”
What she said was nothing. What she thought was that he was crazy. Yet a part of her couldn’t help but admire him. Even to stand in awe of his nutty energy. Who, she wondered, was the true baleboosteh? Not Dorothy, who could not remember when she had given up clipping coupons out of her newspapers and junk mail, or ceased to bother with all the heavy hospital corners of slipcovers, blue water in the toilet bowl. Not Dorothy, who often as not these days let a pot of coffee stand overnight and warmed it up the next day. Not Dorothy, who no longer always bothered to bring back to her condominium the doggy bags and uneaten rolls from restaurants but who, when she did, let the rolls stand out on the kitchen table and warmed them in the toaster oven the next morning to eat with her breakfast, just as she put the contents of the doggy bag not into her freezer but in the refrigerator so she could make her next meal out of the merely day-old leftovers.
So if there were a new baleboss in town, unlikely as it seemed, it had to be old Junior who baked the bread. How different was the way he plotted his campaigns from the way Dorothy had once planned meals for her family? Peculiarly, not that she gave him any credit for it, this made him seem all the more male in her eyes. Driven, she meant, unable or unwilling to let anything go, his hold on life greedy with strength. (She knew, for example, that even after discounting the two or three-year seniority she held over him he was bound to outlive her, to outlive everyone with whom he had struggled for edge over the course of his life.)
“But what did you come up with? Never mind,” he said, glancing at her tools, “those ain’t even got dust on them. I could eat off your trowel.” He picked up her metal detector. “Is it turned on? Are you sure you even know how to work this?”
“I flip the toggle switch. I make little half circles.”
“Well,” Yellin said, “maybe you hit a dry hole here. But that’s hard to buy into. I mean this place is a billion years old, you had to come across something. Beer tabs, bottle caps. The key from a sardine can. A tin of old condoms, for Christ’s sake.”
He spoke as if she’d let him down. Surprisingly, she was not at all surprised.
“No,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss coolly, “no beer tabs, no bottle caps. None of that other stuff either.” She wanted to tell him she had found gold — what do you call them? — doubloons, silver spoons, forks, shining jewels set in precious metal rings. That she held her tongue was a tribute to the great age she knew he would live to be, a lonely old man surviving his children and grandchildren, surviving everyone he had ever known or taken advantage of. She did not wish to add her sarcasm to the weight of his possible regrets.
“It could be defective, I suppose,” Yellin said. “Let me take it out for a spin.”
Dorothy Bliss shrugged and Junior, reactivating the machine he had just switched off so as not to drain its batteries, began going over what seemed to Mrs. Bliss exactly the same ground she and the little girl had previously covered.
“We already did over th—”
“Quiet,” he said, “I think I’ve got something. Hand me that shovel.” He scratched furiously at the packed sand as if he’d hit pay dirt. “See” he said, “see?”
“Have you found something? Is something there?”
“My God,” Yellin said, “it’s sending out signals like a sinking ship. Give me a hand, will you? Use the hoe, get the trowel. Yes, right, good girl, bring the brush.”
Mrs. Ted Bliss, excited, in the sand, on her knees, beside him, leaned into her effort. Breathlessly, she pulled sand from the hole he was digging as if she were bailing the beach. But for the pressure she felt along her arms and in her chest (and her fury), it might have been more than a half century earlier on the shore of Lake Michigan with her children and nephews and nieces, Mrs. Bliss dispensing pail-and-shovel lessons, overseeing pretend burials. The thought brought her up short. She dropped her hoe. (Marvin was dead, some of his cousins; not buried to the neck in Lake Michigan sand but in that cold Chicago boneyard, even their nostrils clogged with dirt, covered by death shmuts.)
“No,” Yellin said, “don’t let up. Why are you stopping?”
Mrs. Bliss shrugged. “What’s the use?” she said.
“What’s that, philosophy? The use is we’re onto something here. Christ, Dorothy, this is hot work.”
Yellin stopped just long enough to wipe his face and neck with a handkerchief, then quickly resumed. “Listen to that. Your metal detector’s beeping away to beat the band. The sound wasn’t nearly as loud at my dig.”
What was he talking about? What beeping? What sound?
“What beeping?” she said. “What sound?”
He stopped digging.
“What beeping? What sound? You don’t hear it?”
“No,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
“Jeez, Dorothy, don’t you have your hearing aid in?”
“Sure I do,” she said.
“You see?” Yellin said. “You see what happens you don’t go for the upscale model? Where are your bells and whistles? On my device there’s even a light that flashes when you’re over something. The bigger the find, the brighter the light. That’s the sort of thing you need.”
She thought of the light Frank had installed on the phone in her bedroom. She thought of all the people she’d missed who said there’d been no answer when they pressed on her buzzer. Not so many. Maybe not so many who said that they had.
“It’s a good thing I came over,” Junior said. “We would have missed this, whatever it is.” He took up his position again over the hole he had dug in the sand. “Wait,” he said, “I think I just heard the shovel clink against something solid. Give me a second here.”
Dorothy watched as Junior Yellin moved the shovel aside and reached his arm deep into the hole, almost as far as his shoulder. “My hand is on it,” he said, making no sound but moving his lips. Before he pulled it out he looked over at Dorothy, staring at her, she thought, almost murderously. “This is a fifty-fifty arrangement, you understand. I mean by actual legal rights it probably ought to be sixty-forty, but I’m bringing you into it because you’re my friend, you staked the claim, and it was your machine even though you missed it and I ended up having to do all the work.”
She watched him carefully.
“What do you say, Dorothy? Shake?”
She couldn’t believe this son of a bitch, but thinking again how long he’d survive her and wishing him only the saddest, dreariest memories, she put her hand out slowly and slipped it into his. Junior smiled. “Done? All right then, done. A deal’s a deal!” he said triumphantly. “So let’s see what we got here.”
He jerked his hand away as if he’d been stung. “Jesus! Son of a bitch! I think I cut myself.” His knuckles and fingers were covered with wet, compacted sand, almost the texture and color of mud. “Can you see, am I bleeding?”
“I don’t see any blood.”
“Some of this buried shit can be jagged, sharp. That’s why they say to wear gloves. You could get a very ancient strain of tetanus. No,” Yellin said, “I don’t see any blood either. I was lucky. That stuff can be a bitch to cure. More painful than rabies shots, they say.”
Mrs. Bliss nodded.
“Think I could use your scarf to wrap around my hand?”
“You give me fifty-five.”
“Ri-i-ght,” Yellin said. “There’s life in the old girl yet, hey Dorothy?” He winked. “Okay,” he said, and reached down into the hole again. “He stuck in his thumb, and pulled out a — Jesus, Mary, and Joe,” he said. “What do you suppose this is?”
Hand over hand he drew more of it up.
The metal had lost definition. It was corroded, discolored, had been transmuted, undergone some heavily inverted oxidation by age and weight and water. Vaguely, pieces resembled figure eights, others, enormous, indistinguishable lumps of wadded gray chewing gum. Mrs. Bliss, who’d never seen anything like it, recognized it at once.
“They’re shackles,” she said. “For slaves. Shipped over from the islands.”
“Jesus, you think?”
“Shackles. Handcuffs. Neck rings and leg irons.”
“For shvartzers?”
Mrs. Bliss looked at this Junior Yellin. “For the doorman. For the girl who comes to clean once a week. For the man who brings the car around.”
“Escaped? You think maybe escaped? I mean we’re a little too south of plantation country. They couldn’t have been tobacco and cotton niggers, do you suppose?”
“There’s storms,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “Ships founder and sink. Rocks scrape their sides and they go down.”
“Absolutely,” Junior Yellin said. “I agree with you, but how do you think—”
“Bodies bloat. They decay. Death puffs them up and lets out their air like leaky balloons. Elements — seawater, the air — chip away at their skin like tapeworms. They melt. Fat lets go. Bones do. And gasses.” The sun! she thought. “Then what’s left to hold them?” Mrs. Bliss pointed to the sordid cache at their feet. “This iron? They slip these useless nooses like Houdinis.”
“Yeah,” Junior said, “I guess so. We write that up on the little cards. We do the whole megillah. Dramatic, hard-hitting. They come away with something to think about. Yeah,” he said, “yeah.
“I think this introduces a whole new dimension,” Yellin said. “ ‘Smuggler’s Museum’ won’t work anymore. Or ‘Dope Runner’s Museum’ either. We’ve got to change it to something more universal. ‘South Florida Museum of Havoc and History’? It needs work. Nothing’s written in stone. But in the ballpark. Think about it. You have a gift for this particular aspect.”
Mrs. Bliss shook her head.
“What?”
“I haven’t got the bells and whistles for this work,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” Junior said, “sure you do. You do. You’re the brains of the outfit.”
Mrs. Bliss found it difficult to look at him. The same poisons that radiated from the sun seemed to pour from his eyes.
“I get it,” Junior said, “you think maybe this is some soft soap I’m handing you. You’re knocking it back to what I said about partners. You probably put that down in case I need someone to help take the load off if I screw up. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing.”
“Will you tell me something?” Mrs. Bliss said.
“Will I tell you something? Will I tell you something? Of course, sweetie. What have I got to hide? We’re old friends. We know each other our whole lives practically. Ask me something, I’ll tell you something.”
She pointed up the beach to where he’d left the dune buggy.
“Where,” she said, “do you get those things? Who gives them to you? All those Frank Buck motorcars you ride around in?”
He seemed flustered, humiliated. Then he was angry.
“All those…What, you think it’s all up with me?” he shot back. “That it’s all over but the shouting? You think that ATV shit is too sporty for a guy like me? Listen, you. I’m a character, I’m colorful. All my life I’m a heartbreaker. My wife, the ladies, my daddy, the kids. My partners. Ask Ted, olov hasholem, you don’t believe me. They held their breath to see where I’d jump next, to see where I’d land. I’m in the air now!”
“Where, Junior?”
“You see?” he exulted.
“No. Where? I mean who gives them to you? What strange lies do you have to tell them?”
Junior Yellin glared at Mrs. Ted Bliss. He held her eyes. Unmoved, she stared back at him. It was an old game she remembered from childhood. She used to play it with her brothers, her sisters. Even in America they played it. Even with her younger cousins Dorothy was always the first to look away, her concentration broken by some comic shame. This time, though, it was Yellin who looked away. He stifled a giggle. “Jesus, Dorothy,” he said.
“No, Milton, I mean it. How do you get those machines? What do you have to pay for them to give them to you?”
“Theah delez plays,” Yellin mumbled.
“What?” she said. “What?”
“They’re dealer’s plates.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, “that’s because you think there ought to be some sort of statute of limitations on trying to stay alive,” he said malevolently.
“No,” said Mrs. Bliss, “no.”
“Bullshit,” Yellin growled. “I tell them I’m opening a business to take seniors on tours off the beaten track, rides in the sand, into the woods. Land cruises. That I put them in all-terrain vehicles on forks in the road. It’s a terrific idea. They all think so. And it is. Just what we came across today, for example. We’d do a land-office business. We’d clean up. I tell them I just have to take it out for a spin. Safety factors. Official vehicular approval ratings.”
“They fall for this?”
“I’m a heartbreaker, they eat it up. Half of them want to come in on the deal with me.”
He was a heartbreaker, he really was, and he made her as breathless as he must have made Ted and all the other dupes and suckers who’d ever had dealings (the dealers) with him. It occurred to her as he ran through his wild defenses that she was not properly dressed for him, that she should have worn the garments of Saharan nomads; that she had made a mistake not to sport gleaming robes, complicated headgear; or to have rubbed heavy sunblock into every pore like a minstrel. That he gave off a sort of cancer, had power to kindle headaches, to dehydrate the heart.
She needed to get back to her apartment.
“So soon?” he said mildly. She was astonished. He’d forgiven and forgotten.
“No, really. I have to.”
“Dorothy. Sweetheart. No one’s here. I’ll turn around, I’ll shut my eyes. Take off your bloomers and walk in the sea to your waist. Raise your dress, tinkle in the ocean.”
It wasn’t his business. She was furious, but despite herself she told him she didn’t have to go. She didn’t. It was the old business of her bladder shutting down on her when she wasn’t near a familiar toilet. Ted had teased her about it in the old days. Even Alcibiades Chitral had questioned her when she’d visited him in the penitentiary. People thought she was too modest, a prude, ashamed, for all her vanity, the pride she’d once taken in her looks, in her body. It was probably true. Though it rolled off other people like water off a duck’s back, she may have been one of the last alive who hadn’t come to accept scandal. Who, though she watched with the same avidity as anyone else the morning TV shows, the mass public confessionals on which everyone — incesters, whores, cross-dressers, the sex changed, the housewives who stripped, fat admirers, klansmen, wife swappers, self-proclaimed thieves, rapists, child abusers, the murderers, the specialist serial killers — admitted to anything, still wanted to cover her eyes, her ears, who couldn’t have fantasized a fantasy if her life depended on it (even that Ted was still alive, even that Marvin was), and who wouldn’t for the world have gone on any of these shows to admit that she had ever had anything so intimate as a body, or that even if she had, it could have found itself on national TV owning up to anything as personal (and it was this, not their standards and practices, that scandalized her) as a function or a need.
It was remarkable to Mrs. Ted Bliss that the whole world did not seize up when it was out of range of a toilet.
And she didn’t care to hear any mishegoss about repression, thank you very much. No. If she wanted no part of Junior Yellin right then it was because he embarrassed her. His remark about peeing in the ocean was the least of it. It wasn’t any one thing. His plans for a museum, what he’d said to the dealers, all the silly, heartbreaking highwire of which he was not only capable but proud, even the fatuity about the superiority of his metal detector, the baloney about the “spot” he was looking for, his crap about the demographics — all his crap. It was amazing, a revelation. She had perhaps at last met a man (taking nothing away from the natural gifts and bona fides of his manhood) whom she couldn’t entirely trust.
But she was his last connection to earth, the life he’d known before he’d become such a caricature of himself. How could she tell him goodbye and good luck, how could she write him off?
Because, sadly, the truth was that if she was his last connection to earth, he was pretty much hers, as well. Maxine, thank God, lived; Frank, whatever his new, changed circumstances, did. George, Judith, and James; Ellen and Barry; Janet and Donny and all of them, thank God. But there was no getting away from it. She was at an age where distance and separation had been transformed into something more important than memory. Or, if not memory (she was too old to tell herself lies), then at least involvement, hands-on concern, the simple day-to-day of all her maternals and sororals and familials down past the most distant cousin to the last of her mathematically attenuate mishpocheh.
She loved them. In some platonic piece of her heart they loomed larger than nations, than civilization itself. It wasn’t a case of out-of-sight out-of-mind. It was much more complicated. As complicated as distance. She was old. She had her health but she was old, and it would have been as difficult for her, as much of a mental and physical impossibility and strain, to bear down on them, on their collective griefs and individual concerns, with the brute force of her concentration as it would have been for her to catch a rubber pelota in the clawlike cesta at the jai alai to send it flying back at the wall, or run after the rabbit at the dog track.
She still spoke to them regularly on the long distance, but the truth was she spent more time idly chatting with Louise Munez at her high-security kiosk and newsstand than with all her children and grandchildren and relatives combined.
No, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, though she wouldn’t go in with him on his schemes, she couldn’t abandon Yellin. No more than she could have stopped putting through calls to her children, or taking them either. But, face it, she was pulling in her horns almost as deliberately as she was just now taking up her tools and substandard, unbelled, whistleless metal detector and starting off in the direction of the ridiculous dune buggy for the long ride home under the unrelenting sun.