Panama

11

MY UNCLE PAT was in his yard on a stepladder, out in the middle of the yard, wiring a creeper to a freestanding trellis. He was in some aerial relationship to the trellis, as though he, on his ladder, were feeding it like a tall bird.

“Pat, Roxy wants to get married.”

“I don’t care a thing about it.”

“I’m making my party at the Casa Marina a wedding party. But she wants to know if you’ll come.”

“I couldn’t say, Chet.” A bead of sweat fell from the tip of Pat’s nose sixteen feet to the ground.

“It’s going to be dressy as hell, Pat. And there’d, you know, be a ceremony.”

“But would I figure?”

“You’d have to work that out with Roxy.”

“It’d be good to have something other than Peavey’s henchmen and their trashy girlfriends.”

“That’s why I thought you might stand up for Roxy.”

“Can I dress?”

I hesitated, but not for long. Pat lived to dress up. It was the key to his attending. I said sure. He got happy quick and the ladder started over. He reached and embraced the trellis. They went down together in parallel. In the descending arc, I could see his happy eyes.

“I’m okay,” he said.

“The plant’s shot,” I said, looking at the turmoil of vines.

“I don’t have a green thumb,” he said. His mind was already on the wedding, his eyes glowing with yet unseen ceremony. I myself thought of the wedding, the orchestra, Catherine, semi-familiar faces, a warm and swollen ocean beaded with the lights of ships. I helped Pat to his feet, lost in happiness. I knocked loose dirt from his getup. “You’re a good uncle,” I told him, remembering the crazy angles of my father’s roof.

“If I could quit cruising,” he said. “People talk.”

* * *

Waiting in front of my house was a familiar man in safari clothes. His hair was slicked straight back without a part and he was chewing a cheroot.

“You are Ramón Condor,” I said, “star of The Reluctant Gaucho.”

“The keys.”

“?”

“The check bounced on the Land-Rover. Get me the keys.”

“They’re in it.”

He walked over to the car.

“This was a go-anywhere vehicle,” he said, “now it’s nothing but a repo.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re a bald-ass liar and your checks are bum.”

“I knew only confusion.”

He was halfway in the car and he got out again. He flicked away the cheroot and cinched up his safari coat. “You knew only confusion…” He started at me. There are those who despise my flair for language.

I saw another smack coming and I lowered my head between my shoulders for protection, simultaneously turning my false-tooth-filled mouth to one side. But then when he got to me, I reflexively popped him in the side of the head and he sat down.

“This whole deal is getting highly Chinese,” he said.

“Don’t be coming at me like that.”

“I oughta leave you for the birds.”

“You’ll have to get to your feet first.”

“Nylon said, ‘Let me collect that for you,’ but me, I had to be big.”

“Nylon hasn’t been doing so good either.”

“But if I hadn’t had to be big, it would of been him instead of me. Now look. God damn polished cotton’s worth its weight in gold. One knee’s done for and the thing is an outfit, not just pants and a jacket. And a tough one to come by.”

“They do reweaving down off Simonton Street.”

“I did it. I have to live with it.” He got in the Land-Rover and left.

“Where’s he going in the Buick,” Catherine asked.

I turned around. “Where did you come from?”

“Kiss me hard.”

I held her.

“I just thought today, maybe I can stand it. You’re out of the question but today I thought, it won’t kill me.”

“I never said that,” I said. “I never said it would kill you.”

I looked at her and she was glowing. She had evidently had some kind of moment with herself. I was holding it away. It seemed as if she was coming back or going to try and I didn’t want to distort it; if I could just hold on to one place for her to come back to. She would do that for me. And why in hell couldn’t I do that for her?

We walked around to the beach and Marcelline was there, sitting on a Ramada Inn towel and reading pornography. I had my arm around Catherine’s waist when Marcelline commenced an excerpt; it was gruesome filth. She laughed, then stopped and looked up. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I mean, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Look,” she said, getting up and folding her towel, “no salesman will call at your door.”

She left.

“Huh,” I said.

“Gee,” said Catherine.

Then Marcelline was back and she was throwing rocks at us. “It’s no call to do me like some doormat!” she shouted.

“Lay off the speed, Marcelline,” Catherine said, “this always happens. It’s venom … put down those rocks.” Marcelline vanished again, weeping this time. “It’s venom, I tell you. Monday she’s blowing one boyfriend in his sports car and by Wednesday she’s cutting her wrists in another’s apartment because he says he doesn’t love her. Then by the time she gets back to the blowjob in the sports car, it’s on holiday in Europe and Marcelline’s standing there wondering why she’s always holding the bag. One minute you’re holding the bag, the next you are the bag.”

“This is your version?”

“This is it, this is la vie en rose.”

“Do you think it’s possible for a little romance?”

“I seriously doubt it. It’s like eating gravel.”

Even in the sun, all the world seems to contain a hollow wailing moan, long and drawn out, as though purgatory understood the meaning of not knowing what was next.

“I love you so,” said Catherine. “Whatever’s missing in the world, I’m doing my part.”

We passed down the purlieus of Duval Street, past vile restaurants addressed “Rue Duval.” On the steps of St. Paul’s Church, a pigeon worked its way diagonally below the feet of two elderly gentlemen, factional members of a Long Island exodus.

“We could have had such a damned good time together,” I heard one say.

“Yes,” replied the one in the bonnet, “isn’t it pretty to think so.”

“Now,” said the former, “I’m heading home to put things by.”

* * *

“Want to hear some poetry, Catherine?”

“Like what?”

“Sappho or Dylan Thomas?”

“You don’t know any Sappho unless Marcelline told you.”

“The fuck I don’t.”

“She better not be reading your ass poems.”

I gave her my favorite Sappho. “Someone, I tell you, will remember us. We are oppressed by fears of oblivion, yet are always saved by the judgment of good men.”

“I didn’t think you knew one.”

“I don’t love Sappho as an excuse for eating pussy,” I said. “Now, let me tell you the Dylan Thomas poem I like.”

“None of the drunken slobber poems,” she said.

“I’ll tell you one that means the most to me: A process blows the moon into the sun, pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin; and the heart gives up its dead.”

“Why is that one important to you?”

“I read it at my father’s funeral.”

“Your father didn’t die, fuckface.”

“Don’t tell me that an event I know by heart didn’t happen. I was the third mourner from the left in the funeral party and don’t call me fuckface.”

“That was your mother’s funeral. You showed me the picture. She did die.”

“My father died in the Boston subway fire!”

“Your father has never been in Boston! I asked him!”

We went into Fitzgerald’s for a drink. The waitresses were stuffing rugs under the lid of the piano. When one came we ordered Stolichnaya and limes. My ears were ringing.

“What are you doing to that piano?”

“The guy we hired is good but he’s too loud. He’s a spade.”

“That makes him too loud?”

“No, he happens to be an Afro-American person. I thought I’d mention that.”

When she came back with the drinks, I said, “Those rugs are going to keep it from playing at all.”

“It’s worth a try.”

“I think you’re showing real aggression toward this musician.”

“Leave her alone, Chet,” said Catherine.

“We love him. He teaches all the ofay waitresses how to get down, and we do his charts and balance his aura.”

“I see.”

“Three dollars.”

Catherine paid. I was on the humble, having mislaid my wallet. People were staring into the bar from outside. I let no one catch my eye. All they want are loans.

“Let’s take a sink or swim approach,” said Catherine.

“A little idle laughter or something?”

“Yeah, or something. We’re getting morbid or something.”

“Or something.”

“How do you feel you’re doing on your memory?”

“I’m avoiding that gumshoe like the plague. He’s been dogging my heels, following me into restaurants with his shitsucker showdowns.”

“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.