Panama

10

I HAD JUST RUN a lemon rind around the inside of my coffee cup, and I was staring at the awakening rummies on the icehouse loading dock, when Don sat down.

I said, “Beat it, Peewee.”

“Just doing my job.”

He was dressed in a suit this time, with the kind of three-button jacket and ill-fitting pants that used to be high with academics from nice families, so that a college kid could look up and say to himself, That’s no smart-ass big-city Jew, that’s people.

“I want my breakfast,” I said. “I don’t want to hear I molested an infant in Spokane at 3 a.m. when I thought I was sleeping.”

“No, but you refused to speak to your father when he called.”

“How would you know that if it were true?”

“Lineman’s phone. Got alligator clips and I just plug into your wire.”

“Uh huh.”

“You told your father he had a wrong number.”

“Shut up! He’s dead!”

The fry cook turned around and stared but kept on scraping.

“And you bounced a check for five hundred thousand dollars.”

I got up. “I don’t need this.”

“You wrote a sixty-thousand-dollar check for a conch house on Caroline. That bounced.”

“Check please.”

The waitress quickly reached me a ticket. I slapped my empty pockets in panic. She couldn’t keep her eyes off me.

“I got it,” said Don and tossed the thirty cents onto the counter. “And that might be the last I can do for your memory. — I’m heading for the pay window.”

* * *

Running on Dey Street, I slide on casuarina seeds and lose a shoe and bang my head and make blood where the cobbles come from under the tar. An old lady leans out from the balcony of the octagonal house, glances at the welding shop, jets snuff into the trees, and says, “You all right?”

There is a trigger that makes the day begin and all life end and it breaks like a glass rod. It lies at the middle of everything that breathes or dreams. It will bend and break, and when it breaks it is night.

I look up to tell her that I have hurt my head but noises even I can’t make out pour from my mouth.

Two of them make a chair of their arms and they put me under the flashing light. One says his eyes are points and the other says Nylon’s gone to appreciate this. I feel sleep coming but I’m not crying and it’s okay because for once I’m not afraid of the ghosts.

* * *

“Jim,” I said to my brother, “do me a favor. Show me how you died.”

“What do you mean? You say Daddy’s dead.”

“He died in the Boston subway fire.”

“I died the day of the Boston subway fire. You just slipped him in there too.”

“Tell me.”

“Not if you say Daddy is dead.”

“Okay he’s not dead.”

“Say he’s alive.”

“I can’t.”

“Say it.”

I said it and started to choke. Someone I couldn’t see ran a finger into my mouth and pulled my tongue free. I vomited and for a moment lost Jim in the sailing shapes. But that lifted and it was sunny and he was there with the innocence I never had, still in his face; all the trust that let him be murdered by his life without humiliation.

“Everything went off and left me,” Jim said.

They took me to Catherine’s on my release. There was no bandage around my head, no bump, nothing. I had had a concussion and was supposed to lay low. I had few impressions except that my eyes had grown small, the worst had been wished on me, I had found something out from Jim, and I was among the living. My dog was missing.

“I don’t know where she is,” Catherine said.

“Well, we’ve got to find her.” I told her to call the pound, tell them it was Deirdre, spots, white feet, missing. I was thinking of those men, their frayed nerves and the gas. There was no answer. I said run an ad. Catherine covered the mouthpiece.

“The paper wants to know what she answers to.”

“She doesn’t.”

She uncovered the mouthpiece and said, “Spots is the main thing I guess.” She hung up and came over. “Oh, darling, I love you. Get better. Stop being under such a strain.”

“I can’t seem to.”

“Of course you can.”

“Every time I try to relax, I start crying. I don’t feel like a grown man that way.”

“Where is it written you have to be a grown man?”

“All over the place.”

“It’s not.”

I could hear a shrimper’s diesel backing down at Brito’s yard; and the vacuum-cleaner sound of the bus. Catherine watched me steadily. I covertly tried to see if her eyes would shift; they didn’t.

“I looked at my new house,” she said. “It was lovely.”

“Oh, I’m glad.”

“Very carefully made.”

“Porch boards are sprung.”

“That’ll give us something to do.”

“And I’d like a wooden grill around the foundations so that cats don’t get under there and…”

“… and fight.”

“Yes, and fight under there all the time.”

“Yes.”

“They better find my dog. They don’t find my dog I’m calling Jesse.”

Catherine watched me, her eyes two stones in the mercury air.

* * *

Sometime later I awakened and Catherine was sleeping beside me, warmth radiating from her brown back, and I laid my face in the channel between her shoulder blades and pulled her thick curly hair around her neck so that I could look at the telegraph wires in the window. Warm moist air moved in a gentle mass over us; and across the way, a radio played a giddy weather report for the tourists. In the bottom of the window, laundry floated into my view. I felt like sailing with my love, feeling the centerboard hum in the wooden hull, the shapes of islands vault past our daydreams.

That or reviewing my life; but a good bit too much life reviewing has gone on already. The only wisdom it produces is the resolution to not do any further reviewing. My nose itched and I ground it against Catherine’s spine. She stirred and curved her bottom up against me; and then again, and then we were sleepily making love. When we were done, she turned and put her arms around me and her face against my chest and said, “Oh, darling, get well.”

The statement seemed to come from a very far place within her. I didn’t know exactly what she meant by it; but I felt, with great strength, that I wanted to give that to her. I wanted to get well. I just didn’t know what that was. If there was a fear, it was that I had never known; that I had been strikingly not well from the start; that my ticket to ride, such as it was, was based on the vividness of disease; and that I was paying for everyone else.

My first instinct was that a social life depended simply upon giving people what they wanted. So, I called Peavey, as a kind of test case.

I told him that I had finally understood that marriage was what Roxy wanted and that I therefore endorsed that view and would see Roxy that very day to make myself clear.

“Why, that’s very nice.”

“I am going to try to stop interfering,” I said.

“I think you should.”

“I am going to attempt to be normal,” I said, “eat regularly, see some motion pictures, and take in the hot spots on weekends.”

“Right…”

“And anyway, that’s all.”

“Well, that’s very nice. And look here, I’d like to return the favor. I got a line on your dog. I’ll have Nylon Pinder drop it by.”

“Say,” I said, “thanks a lot. I appreciate that. Nylon been feeding her pretty good?”

“Not too bad. Not too damn bad.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

“A house pet should have special care,” Peavey said.

“Well,” I said, “I’ll be talking to you.”

“Real good, and thanks!”

Catherine was looking at me.

“I’m trying,” I explained. It was quiet.

She said, “You’re the original snowball in hell.” She was shaking all over.