Panama

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.

“What do they want from you?” asked Catherine.

“I don’t know. But my job is to make them think they’re going to get it.”

She looked at me; you know how — long and assessing, ending with a sudden grin. I want to isolate this, the sudden smile, emerging as it does in Catherine as — what? — well, as a sunburst, from deep thought. Similarly, when after puzzling over some confusion, Catherine says no, it is as sudden and fatal as the sunburst smile. It is over. Do you see? Over.

Then we went and hung around the Richmond — San Rafael bridge. I stared ruefully at Alcatraz while Catherine wrote our names on the abutment, in a heart, with a chalky stone, scratching away and talking about the South and the poor complexions of San Francisco while I, as usual, talked about the dead and near-dead. Catherine, strong and living, had thrown herself at my feet. I couldn’t shut up.

I had at that time a bodyguard who had had a distinguished career as a U.S. Marshal in Portland and Northern California. His name was Roy Jay Llewelyn and he had survived many shootouts in Federal Service. He had also sent many people to Alcatraz, and as Catherine and I played, he gazed serenely at its impregnable shape.

Roy knew many other hired guns in the area, some U.S. Marshals, and they were a little society of men who showed each other their bullet holes. Later, when Marcelline spoke of triggermen, I thought of Roy.

Roy took Catherine and me to the dump at south San Francisco. The triggermen were there, car lights trained on a hill of rubbish, shooting rats. On the hoods of their cars were supertuned Pachmayr combat pistols. The hill was ignited like a movie screen, and back in the dark, the cigarettes of gunslingers glowed over the sound of AM car radios. Now and then, a voice: “There’s a damn goblin, Roy.” A rat would creep through the glare of illegal hot car lights — quartz iodide shimmer on wet fur — and Roy Jay Llewelyn would drop into position and let the goblin have it. As night sank in, hungry rats threw caution to the winds while Catherine and I crawled into the back seat of Roy’s triple-tone Oldsmobile. Gently, I undressed Catherine for the first time while the younger gun hands crowded around Roy. We made love for a long while as the automatics popped and rat parts flew among the rubbish. San Francisco then had been an earlier song, a song of Alcatraz, pet stores, Japanese-Croatian restaurants, gunmen, and rat gore. Love affairs have begun more prettily; but that was the only one we got. I was a star and couldn’t just walk around.

Catherine had been living for a year and a half on three Maxwell House coffee cans of inherited jewelry. She was so frugal then that there were, when I met her, still two cans left, including the one that contained her great-aunt Catherine’s emerald bracelet, bought for her by her husband when he commanded a ship for the Navy in China.

I swept Catherine off her feet to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, years before rich rock-and-roll fascists took it over. At that time, it was a hotel where the staff specialized in memorizing faces just to tell you how good it was to see you again.

I was making a tremendous living demonstrating, with the aplomb of a Fuller Brush salesman, all the nightmares, all the loathsome, toppling states of mind, all the evil things that go on behind closed eyes. When I crawled out of the elephant’s ass, it was widely felt I’d gone too far; and when I puked on the mayor, that was it, I was through. I went home to Key West and voted for Carter.

We set a room service record.

I would send out for little things. A single pack of Salem Longs. Trifles. We had much sex, even while on the phone; or during Ed McMahon dog-food commercials, where a spaniel would choose between two bowls. When Catherine took her chair into the bathroom to play with the taps, I knew we’d been in the hotel too long. The message light was flashing on the phone. There were huge blue grapes soaking the morning New York Times. I called to check out. News of what I’d done to — or, I should say, on—the mayor had hit the hotel. The staff stared at me. I said the mayor would soon be writing spy novels in prison like other government felons; but I had little conviction. They didn’t like me and they didn’t think I was funny.

At La Guardia, I wore dark glasses and ate about a pound of Oreo cookies, after which I could have really nailed the mayor, but I thought, “Why cry over spilt milk?”

Nighttime 707 Commuter to Miami: little reading lights ignited the disembodied arms in rows in front of me, arms which listlessly flipped airline magazines, or held cigarettes to stream smoke into the cones of light now and then swept aside by the air current behind a hurrying stewardess. All of us passengers were torn from our origins. Red and green lights shimmered on riveted aluminum wings and beneath us my little America, my baby madhouse, deployed towns and farms and cities against the icy ruinous transept of time and the awful thing which awaits it.

Catherine and I swallowed cocktails from the cart, though we seldom had the correct change and drew ugly glances from the stewardesses. I felt that my hands and feet were swelling up and that the pilot had falsified the cabin pressure. I felt too that having to go up and down the aisle at night, to put up with incorrect change and the flight crew’s demand for snacks, was infuriating the stewardesses and that any minute an atrocity directed at the sheeplike passengers with their magazines could break out. Catherine and I were in tough shape mentally; and we had started to fear the stewardesses. As though to throw fat on the fire, they began to gather in the tail of the plane, to ignore the call buttons and to block the toilet. My stomach was full of butterflies and when I saw an old man gesture helplessly to a stewardess as she shot to the tail, I felt I had to do something for us all. I unfastened my seat belt, catching Catherine’s alarmed glance, and started aft. I thought as I glided above the passengers that I saw their hopes of something better winging to me.

The stewardesses glowered toward my approach. They were in a little group. There were sandwich wrappers and styrofoam. An aluminum door was ajar behind them and toilet light flooded forth. They had more food than we did. They seemed to glance at one blonde, a Grace Kelly type with a Bic crossways in her tunic. I was afraid.

When I reached them, I said, “There’s an old man who needs a glass of water. Can you help?”

The blonde stared through me. Then she reached up and touched a switch. Over three hundred passengers, RETURN TO SEAT appeared in lights.

“Hit it,” said the blonde.

“I wonder if I—”

“Can’t you read?”

“The old man needs—”

“I don’t care what he needs. We are entering turbulence. Return to your seat and extinguish all smoking materials.” Then she added something which signaled the beginning of my understanding that the end of my glory was at hand. “You rotten pervert,” she said. “Blowing your cookies all over the mayor of New York.”

* * *

Zut alors! I am in arrears with everyone; else why are they all explaining the sky is blue or yesterday I ate breakfast twice? Why? Someone said, “Two plus two equals four is a piece of insolence.” And these simpletons think I shall accept their reports at face value! Not possible; a thousand times no.

I’m not complaining. If people accept me as I am, that is, fallen from a high place, and don’t assume that I am in despair and require that actuality be described to me, why then a happy liaison of spirits is always a possibility. But not if we are doing ABCs on the state of reality.

Enough of this. The marriage of my aunt, Roxanna Hunnicutt, impends. I must touch base with the orchestra.

But before I do, I would like to note that I, screw loose and fancy free, know certain things, that I am crazy like a fox. I know that Jesse robbed and killed and that he was lonely. I know he was left behind, left for dead. But I know he rose again from the dead. At the same time as these issues ring, I know that I must touch base with the orchestra.

As to this orchestra, I am an admirer; at the same time, I know better. I came of age like everyone else, wearing out copies of Tupelo Honey, feeling richly gloomy. Now in Los Angeles, Jackson Browne and the Eagles nurse everybody’s bruises, and Mick Jagger, the tired old hag, says the Rolling Stones are the best punk band in the world. It’s desperate. I prefer Jorge Cruz playing for endless Cuban weddings in Key West, the only city in America where you can buy novelty condoms in the municipal airport, and where the star of The Dog Ate The Part We Didn’t Like can have a little peace.

The first thing Jorge said was, “I wait and I wait and you never get back to me.”

“I had an egg on my head.”

“I wait and I wait.”

“Egg.”

“I see the egg in the paper. I see your discharge from Florida Keys Memorial. Still I wait.”

“Will you play for our family?”

“On one condition.”

“Which is?”

“That the weeds are cut down at the Casa Marina so that my orchestra is not driven crazy with chiggers.”

“It’s a deal.”

“You hurt my feelings when you didn’t call. I thought it was my music.”

“I neglected you. Accept my apologies.”

“But I will, of course.”

I let go of Jorge’s handlebars. He rolled up Lopez Lane and disappeared behind a car body. The haze from City Electric brought its air of extraordinary romance. Each filling station seemed like a cheerful island with the bright pumps standing bravely in the tropical smoke. Through the open doorways of old homes came the anomalous ring of cash registers or piping television serials. I was transfixed by a beauty beyond the hideous. My heart was a song. Nothing hugs the road like a garbage truck.

I am enclosed in here, in my reflecto Ray-Bans. Look at me and what do you see? Yourself.

Peavey is in his office. I’m relieved that he’s out of Roxy’s Florida room with that girl, though I see her behind the water cooler, huge bubbles rising through her visage. She’s changing a column of those little one-swallow paper cups. She looks up at me and for an instant a bubble enlarges her left eye to the size of a melon.

I wave and she turns to Peavey, who’s turned to me.

“Counselor,” I say.

“Chet.”

“What’s the word?”

“Beats me, Bubba.”

“The hell you say.” I grin.

“What can I do you for?”

“I got Jorge Cruz lined up.”

“Fabulous.”

“Tell you though, the guy laid a condition on me. He wants the weeds down.”

“We’ll get them down but not because he said so.”

“Who do I call?”

“Southernmost Lawn. They got a big Weed Eater, go right through that junk. Got four Bahamians with grass whips. Put the place right in shape.”

“There are a lot of cats in that deep grass,” I say, starting to lose it already. Peavey fixes me and raises a Benson and Hedges to his lips.

“Well, they’re going to have to get out.”

“That’s the heck of it,” I say. Peavey knows I’m going down for the count. Might just as well face that.

“You seen that boat off White Street pier?”

I start around the desk and he says, “Get out.”

“Relax,” I tell him. “This is no clambake and you are among friends.”

I left Peavey balling the jack with bubblehead and all the lights on his phone shining like a southern constellation.

* * *

I stopped to see my uncle Pat. He used to be in American Intelligence and he has a tremendous amount of stuff from the Germans, including a phonograph and a stack of Nazi 78’s, which he often plays while working. Pat’s practice has gotten to where there’s no need of an office. He works on the dining-room table listening to Nazi songs — he’s not a Nazi — adding codicils and revising bills of grievance which he sometimes circulates free of charge. I told him two o’clock Sunday; no dresses. Pat wasn’t making any promises. Also, and I can’t be emphatic enough about this, he’s no Nazi.

* * *

And then — then! — it was raining. Rain in Cayo Hueso can be a rare thing, as you streak over the cracked sidewalk under the awning of trees, a curtain of translucent rain, the endless hiss of traffic. The watery green leaves turn up and the dust on the Spanish limes rinses down till their dark, vivid forms stand out in their own clouds of green. I step to the left and the cloud water, the ocean rain, goes straight to my skin and I picture that my own form is as vivid in this fatigue shirt and jeans and Sonia sandals as a Spanish lime tree, soaking energy from the rain and getting ready to drop seeds on those roofs until everyone inside is crazy from not sleeping. Rain is one thing that will make you feel you can go on.

* * *

Roxy is being fitted, standing on the aqua carpet with bright veins in her bare feet. A girl sits cross-legged on the floor, pins in her mouth, and says, “Iv vat about vight for lengf?”

“Just right. I want only the ends of my slippers peeping out. I have stringy calves, which do not go with my pot belly.” I think I’m the only one who sees Roxy as a comedian. Remember, she’d already died once. It fascinates me.

“O Miff Hunnicutt!”

Looking at Roxy, I felt a tingle of family comfort. You become a soft warm object and the brain slowly shapes itself to the facts. For a blessed moment, you are totally lacking in views.

When the little girl headed out, Roxy said she was a bit peckish and would I be a dear and take the Imperial and get us a couple of Big Macs? Pour quoi non, I chuckled. I headed for Roosevelt Boulevard. I never object to making a burger run. In Baby America, a fellow wants to know his fast-food inside and out. I bought Roxy and me two mid-range burgers and one large fries, with napkins and ketchup-paks to go.

And Roxy sure had eyes for the little dickens, sinking her teeth through the cheese shields with sudden fury, cupping her left hand underneath for drippings. Holding our hamburgers, we were both living in the present.

She was sitting in the green silk chair, threads poignantly snagged by cats over the years, as though by design.

“Tracked Ruiz down.”

“Oh?”

“Hand-lining grunts for Petronia Street.”

“I thought so,” I said.

“He had a heck of a deal here. Could’ve been a sinecure. But he couldn’t keep his hands off my grapefruits.”

“Seemed like there was enough to go around,” I said.

“Criminals don’t think that way,” said Roxy.

“No,” I crooned with boredom. “I don’t suppose.”

“Peavey and I don’t plan on children.”

I thought, I wonder if this is hilarious.

“Fine with me.”

“He felt you might think we were going to soak up your inheritance with babies. Have no fear. Anyway, most of it is going to that Jerry Lewis disease.”

“Muscular dystrophy?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fine.”

“Otherwise it ends up in the hands of dope peddlers, dishonest professional athletes, and corrupt disc jockeys.”

“Really!”

“I think so, don’t you?”

“I imagine I do.”

“As to the wedding, I’ll be there,” she assured me.

“Me too.”

“Pat wants to be maid-of-honor.”

“I told him no dresses.”

“I asked that you not interfere. He’s having a dreadful time with his practice and there’s little enough for him that brings any pleasure. Besides, she’s already started by now.”

“Who?”

“The seamstress, the seamstress who just left here.”

“What about her?”

“She’s fitting Pat.”

“He’ll never wear it. World War II and life in our family have ruined his nerve.”

“Now, I am contributing to the bar three cases of my precious absinthe that Pat brought back from France when he was with Intelligence. It’s for the family and you’ll have to ask for it. Watch it. I have seen people get very ugly on absinthe. I have seen them be unkind to household pets and behave in every respect as though they hadn’t all their buttons.”

“Yes…”

“As you once did for a living? It’s disturbing that you were in such demand.”

“The theory was that I was a visionary and that I was certainly playing with a full deck.”

“I’ll just bet.”

“Roxy, please, if you would.”

“The other day your father told me he thought it was all a really good gag—”

I gave her the blankest of blank stares. Roxy stared back.

“Oh, that’s right, you’ve decided he doesn’t exist. In the father and son game, I guess that’s the best stunt of all. Well, let me tell you something, you prize boob, the world is full of things that are not awaiting your description. And your father is one of them.”

I felt panic.

“You and Peavey deserve each other for the aimless cruelties you commit, you evil shitsucker. I ought to kill you.”

I bounded out.

* * *

When I left Roxy’s, I promptly met the writer. He was looking at me and simultaneously pressing thumb and forefinger into his eyes.

“I thought you were going home,” I said. I needed to know someone had one to go to.

“It’s a matter of composure. It’s like walking out of a bar after you’ve lost a fight. I’ll go when I’m ready.”

We strolled past La Lechonería toward the synagogue. He knew all the little streets and stared up and down with sad affection.

“I want to show you something,” he said and took me down a sandy lane that passed through an open field to the sea. Even I didn’t know it went to the sea. We pushed through litter and saw grass until the edge of the water; where I saw something which I took for a bad sign: six dead greyhounds rolled in the wash, eyes swollen shut with sea water.

“Losers from the track,” he said. “I’m getting off the rock. I love the rock but it’s a bad rock.”

“Good luck.”

“On what?”

“On getting shut of this place.”

“Thanks. I’m going to need it.”

* * *

Don and I walked downtown. Each time I go there something has changed. Today an old family jewelry store had become a moped rental drop; a small bookstore was a taco stand; and where Hart Crane and Stephen Crane had momentarily coexisted on a mildewed shelf was now an electric griddle warming a stack of pre-fab tortillas. From the gas dock I could see the flames from the Navy dump, burning at the base of a steeply leaning column of black smoke. When you sail around Fleming Key, passing downwind of the dump, the boat fills suddenly and magically with flies, millions of them, it seems, for when the fire is out, they fill the air downwind like a cloud. “You see,” I said to Don. “I’m capable of noticing and remembering.”

“Some things. Until you remember like you’re supposed to, you’re bad for the world.”

“All right now, Don. You’re starting to bore me. So, on your way.”

“No,” said Don. We were in the middle of one of those sourceless browsing mobs, the origin of my own mystery; and I wanted to move with them and feel for the moment when, on the average, they forget the highway and wherever it is they come from.

I asked Don once more to detach himself from me: it seemed that he was acquiring some suppurating need for studying me. Still, he hung on. So, right at him, in that crowd, I began to shout odd snatches from Smithsonian Institute animal records. He couldn’t stand the pressure and beat a hasty retreat right up the street where I’d tried to buy that parrot. I smiled to the crowd; they soon forgot and I was once again among them, moving toward our dream of forgetfulness.

Past the Little Charles Guest House, there is a concrete house with flamingos cut in the foundations, and on that street many of the blacks speak only Spanish. There are people throwing coins against the curb and leaving the doors open on their parked cars so they can hear the radio. A couple of houses down, you can look through the lattice at the bottom, under the house, and you can see the cats all under there, kind of tortoiseshell, kind of related-looking. I began to think of the cats at the Casa Marina, in the deep grass. I began to wonder if they would be safe from the Weed Eater and those Bahamians with the grass whips.

When I went out there, the cats were arrayed against a spangle of sea light, watching the Bahamians destroy their homeland. They were in a row and rather self-possessed. It was my opinion that they would find another way of life; and the white man at the borders with the Weed Eater failed to alter that conviction.

I called Catherine at home. The little burst I’d had, feeling the cats would find a way, I wanted to spend on her.

“May I come over?”

“What can I do for you, Chet?”

“May I come over?”

“Masturbate with a crucifix?”

“I know I am a Catholic. At the same time there are other ways of viewing my conduct. I ought to strangle you.”

“That’s my way of saying that you have a rotten little Catholic heart, which is my privilege as a veteran of the Catholic wars, do you hear me?”

“There is no rotten little Catholic heart. There is only the Sacred Heart of Jesus and I have seen it shine in a Missouri tunic, a cane in the scabbard, on a horse named Stonewall Jackson.”

“Do you know what I’m doing this very minute?”

“What?”

“I’m looking at a photograph of Jesse James in his coffin.”

I slammed that phone down good. Liar, liar, liar. I know he lives.

* * *

A person I trusted at the time said it was time for me to go home, because home was a controlled environment, and that I was having a destructive effect on all and sundry out in America. It is time, he said, to leave the Sherry-Netherland and to go home; the dog is eating everything.

* * *

On the sides of the Casa Marina, there are fire escapes which are like metal stairways except that the last section is lowered from above so that the stairs can only be used going down, by someone capable of letting down that last section. Furthermore, this prevents types who might be abroad at odd hours from ascending the fire escape into the hotel. Also, on the sides of the hotel are brown ventilator exhausts which look like carp. Beyond this, I can hear the furor of my aunt’s wedding from within.

On the east side, you can peer through the steel mesh at an old courtyard which lies before the sealed arches of the front of the old hotel. From here, you can barely hear the wedding. One more block and I could have lost touch entirely. I didn’t have the nerve for that.

At Clarence S. Higgs Memorial Beach, I walked out the plank dock. It goes out on the water a considerable distance and then stops at the ruins of an older dock that goes another fifty yards. At this point, there is a great spoked wheel which prevents you from trying to get on the ruined dock. Turning when I got to the wheel, I was able to see the wedding crowd. I could see that boat too. And Jorge Cruz’s orchestra sent its strains of Old Key West across this new seascape where pilings sucked in the tide like regret. It was time to start for the wedding.

I turned into the hotel by the old octagonal lounge, whose weird acoustics had put the bar out of business. The wedding was still not in sight but Catherine was waiting for me. She was wearing a silk dress with angular shoulders, like Billie Holiday; and she had a red flower in her hair. She was wearing about a half of a coffee can of old jewelry and carrying a little beaded purse in both hands. When I looked at her, I fell in love all over again. At the same time, it was like watching something through a window. My heart had lost its purchase, its ability to do anything for anyone, and could only register. But it had perhaps never registered more.

“How is the wedding?” I asked.

“Very well. They all are taking it very seriously. Roxy has her man and Peavey has his waterfront.”

“God, Catherine. I miss my old show. It was like this in many ways.”

“I thought about their marriage. It’s fair. Let’s go in and dance.”

We walked into the old homeland of the cats. There was a small crowd among the abandoned buildings. The swimming pool was empty and on the concrete ramp for the long-gone diving boards I thought I glimpsed a familiar figure and that he was staring at me.

I watched the wedding as closely as I could. There was the turmoil of the party behind which the slower geometry of ceremony could be seen, to the extent that I would see, knowing what a meat cleaver daily history is and how we trend, despite our most luminous acts, steadily toward oblivion. Whether I refused to look or refused to remember just didn’t matter any more. For me, viewing the perpetual stream of leftovers, I could only conclude once more that the dog ate the part we didn’t like. I had the only reasonable motive in the place: I wanted to dance.

I took Catherine in my arms. I thought the orchestra was playing the same song I’d heard from the dock. They were dressed in yellowing linen. There were many people dancing and I cast my eyes about blindly, avoiding, for the moment, any recognition while my beloved and I danced at the edge of the sea.

My uncle Pat soared past, wearing one of his twenty-year-old seersucker suits. I knew that the dress would hang reproachfully in his closet forever. I winked over Catherine’s shoulder and he winked back. He knew that I knew.

Nylon Pinder wore white shoes and pants with a white patent-leather belt secured by a Wells Fargo replica buckle. He sported a polyester nik-nik shirt with pastel clouds and the faces of women of the 1930’s superimposed on flying borzois. Nylon was hugely moved by the ceremony. He shook my hand with both of his and said simply: “It is the dawn of a great era.” The morning paper had spattered his tongue with new phrases. Nevertheless, he still bore the livid scar on his cheek, one further mark of the all-consuming dog.

Catherine had put her head on my shoulder as we danced. When Roxy and Peavey came into our view, I asked if we could double-cut, and we did.

“Well, I’ve done it,” said Roxy.

“My congratulations.”

“I think you will agree the end is always in sight.”

“The end of what?”

“The end of the absinthe.”

“Is that what you meant?”

She said, “No.”

* * *

I guess Catherine and I had danced a half hour or so when I first spotted Marcelline with her boyfriend. I might have seen them earlier but I was not looking in the direction of the diving board; and I believe the two of them had been lurking in the sea grapes over there.

The boyfriend wore a sparkling Hawaiian shirt and Marcelline had, once more, her air of corrupt glamour, bits of bright string and ribbon tied in her hair, blatant paste rings on every finger.

“Your family have been here a long time, haven’t they?” asked the boyfriend indulgently.

“Yes, yes they have.”

“Isn’t that your father?”

“No,” I said.

“How up are you on local history?”

“Not that up.”

“You ever heard about Lieutenant Pomeroy?”

“I don’t think so.”

Our dancing came to a complete stop. Marcelline put her hand in my back pocket.

“Well,” said the boyfriend, “he was a native of Key West who fought the pirates two hundred years ago.” They were leading us toward the sea grapes. “He was killed escorting a slave ship from Havana.” We were in the trees at the edge of the sea now. I could hear hermit crabs in the awkward roots where the tide glided unmercifully. “He might have been kin to you.”

“Why are you telling me about Lieutenant Pomeroy?”

“Well uh, Marcelline and I are kind of low, kind of cash-poor right now—”

“And what?” Dread arose. The boyfriend picked up the sack from between the roots.

“Do you want to buy him?”

He stretched open the sack and there was Lieutenant Pomeroy.

Marcelline said, “It’s purely historical. I mean, there’s no jewelry. There’s some military buttons and a sword handle. But we guarantee he’s complete.”

I glimpsed the bones glowing in the sack and turned suddenly. “No,” I said. Catherine was already gone. I hurried to the dancers and still I couldn’t see her. Then, from nowhere, she passed close to me, carrying her wrap.

“It was awful,” I said, aching with hope and guilt.

“You attract that sort of thing like a lightning rod.”

“I do not!” I said desperately. I could see it coming.

“Then why why why do these things always happen to us?”

“Oh please, darling, don’t blame me for it. I didn’t do it.”

“Sweetie, I can’t stand it.”

And then she was gone. I watched her in her silk dress go shimmering through the palms and vanish. Then a bright car filled the space she’d gone through and spilled dancers onto the lawn.

When I turned around, he was walking from the diving board toward me. Roxy and Peavey stood amid applause and elevated glasses. He said, “This is a sham but it’s not my money. I’ll see you at your place at twelve. No sense staying beyond that.”

By the time I got to Catherine’s, there was a cab in front and suitcases on the sidewalk. There were bones all over the yard.

“Is that Lieutenant Pomeroy?” I asked.

“Yes, they said they’d have never gone and gotten him if we were going to take it like that. They said we made them feel like second-class citizens.”

“Going to the bus?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Can I ride over with you?”

“Sure.”

“Aren’t you going to change?”

She was wearing her wedding clothes.

“No.”

“Can we make love one last time?”

“No.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“There’s nothing in the house I want. Marcelline and that guy took the stereo in exchange for the skeleton. They were blown out and I was afraid to argue with them.”

We got the suitcases into the cab and sat in the back. When tears first came, the red flower in Catherine’s hair blurred until it filled the air. Then I stopped.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Thinking of going to Panama.”

“Why?”

“It’s the last place I saw you.” She pressed her beautiful hands to her face and said, “In Panama I’m married. I have a man and he’ll stand up for me through thick and thin. Everywhere else I’m in pieces.”

I will say for myself, when it all comes rattling down, that I bought her ticket to the mainland. She said, “You can die trying.” And the hydraulic doors closed behind her before I could tell her it was still the best way to go. When the bus swung around I saw the red flower in the window; and because I thought our souls would be together forever, I believed it was the third window from the left. I knew I would never see Catherine again.

At twelve o’clock Jesse came, a cane in the scabbard, his years at sea, the difficulties with the smokey subways of Boston behind him. He said, “We want the same thing.” He stepped through the door as though he owned the place and asked what I called him Jesse for. I told him you have so many names for things that matter. He walked across the room, leaned down, and turned on the lamp. Then he cut his eyes straight up to his portrait on the wall.

“When was that taken?” he asked.

“Ten years ago.”

“I’m wearing out fast,” he said and reached his hands out in front of himself. He gazed at their age spots. “I never thought I’d look like this.”

“Well, you do.” I sat down.

“You know who I am,” he said quietly. “Can’t you say hello?”

When I was young, we used to dive into the swimming pool from the highest board on moonless nights, without looking to see if there was water in the pool, knowing that it was emptied twice a month. I felt the same blind arc through darkness when I spoke to my father. He just watched me say the word and after that either of us could go, knowing there was more to be said and time to say it. Perhaps we wished there was not so much time.