Beth shrugged. “It works more times than not,” she said.
“Hey, listen,” Gordon said, turning his attention to Marshall as if he’d just walked through the door. “How the hell are you? How’ve you been?”
“How have I been?” Marshall echoed. “This has been a very confusing year. I haven’t been all that well.”
“You haven’t?” Gordon said. Marshall could hear the trepidation in his voice. He drained his beer, his eyes darting to a lizard heading for one of the bougainvillea pots.
“I’m fine,” Marshall said halfheartedly. “I had a friend along on part of the ride. He was having health problems.”
“He try the Corona cure?” Beth said.
“No,” Marshall said. “As far as I know, he didn’t try that.”
“Hey, babe, how far ahead should I light those coals?” Gordon said.
“Better dump them in the barbecue first,” she said.
“Notice that I married a wise ass?” Gordon said. “I love her, though. Babe, tell him how we got the ceiling fans in the house.”
“No,” she said. “It’ll sound like bragging.”
Gordon shrugged. The bird shrieked again.
“Get away, you fucking asshole!” Beth yelled at the cat, racing toward the fence. She bypassed the beer bottles, stepped over Gordon’s discarded T-shirt, Marshall’s kicked-off shoes. “And stay away!” she hollered.
“Pretty boy!” the bird shrieked. “Pretty boy. Pretty boy.”
“Oh, my long-suffering ass you’re pretty,” Gordon said, picking up his empty bottle and throwing it into the yard.
“Gordon!” Beth said.
“Yeah?” he said.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Is it my fault if our friends the Rastafarians have a problem with picking up after themselves when they’ve been drinking beer?”
“Don’t do that again,” she said.
“Pretty boy, pretty boy,” Gordon said, puffing out his chest. He smiled at Beth. “How is it you think that bird lives through every night? You’re not awake all night long to protect it, unless that book you were reading on astral projection finally took.”
“All I know is I’ve stopped that cat from getting it approximately one million times.”
“She sends protective thoughts to it during the night,” Gordon said.
“I say a prayer for it. That’s all I do,” she said, handing Marshall a dish filled with nuts. The dish was in the shape of a flamingo’s head, nuts filling the shallow pocket of its beak. A bright blue eye stared up at Marshall as he reached for the dish. Gordon’s fingers dipped in. Some of the nuts scattered to the deck; others made it into his mouth.
“Here comes the part where he objects that I’m mystical, as he calls it,” Beth said. “I meditate before dinner. Watch him make fun of me once I turn my back.”
A new tape was clicked into the boom box: the sounds of the sea, Marshall guessed. The sea, with chimes intermittently ringing. Marshall watched her disappear into the house, heard a door close behind her.
“She meditates in the Mary Kay room,” Gordon said. “You know what I tell her? That she’s in there meditating for money.”
“Pretty necklace she got from Evie,” Marshall said.
“Say what?”
“Her necklace,” Marshall said. “She said it was Evie’s.”
“That what she was wearing?” Gordon said. “Yes, very nice of Evie.”
Marshall waited, hoping he’d say something else. Finally, Gordon said, “Hey. How about some colder-than-cold beers? Friend of mine is tending bar tonight down at the Green Parrot. What do you say I light these coals and we duck out while she’s meditating?”
“Sure,” Marshall said.
“That all right with you?”
“Sure,” Marshall said again. He was slightly drunk and didn’t intend to drink more once he got to the bar, but he decided he’d go along for the ride.
“Hey, I can tell you all about the buyout,” Gordon said. “I got my hopes up.”
“This might really happen, huh?”
“Might happen. Yeah, might happen. If so, I’m going to think something from living with Beth rubbed off. She’s got the most amazing good luck of anybody I ever met, let alone a pretty woman. Women don’t have much luck at all, in my personal experience. Listen to them long enough, you’ll think no one woman ever had a moment’s luck, ever.”
“Yeah,” Marshall said. As he spoke, he wondered exactly what he was agreeing with.
“Okay, we’re out of here,” Gordon said. As he passed the boom box, he turned up the volume slightly. “I know just how she likes it,” he said. “Music, at least. The rest, you go figure.”
This seemed not to require a reply.
“You mind hanging on to the back of a motorcycle?” Gordon said. “It’s not mine, it’s borrowed. I’m giving it back to the bartender. We can walk back.”
“How far is this place?”
“Across town, but town’s about as wide as the Queen Mary sideways. You know about the fish that saw the shadow of the Queen Mary’s bottom, right?”
Searching for his keys in a fishbowl of change on the floor near the front door, Gordon forgot to expect a reply. If that’s the Queen Mary’s bottom, then God save the King, Marshall thought. If someone had asked him for the punchline of the joke — that joke, or any joke — he wouldn’t have thought of it. Amazing, the irrelevant things stored away that could be tapped into, spontaneously.
The motorcycle was a big black Harley. When Gordon turned the key in the ignition, it sounded like something large exploding; then the engine settled into a burbling, growling monotony. Instead of a helmet, Gordon pulled on a baseball cap that had been stretched over the fake leopard-skin seat. Marshall jumped on and the motorcycle took off at a forty-five-degree angle, Gordon hollering something into the wind he didn’t understand. “When I lean, don’t lean with me,” Gordon said a second time. “Sit back there like you’re Queen Elizabeth on the throne. Sure ain’t gonna be Prince Charlie, all the trouble he’s gotten himself into. Whoo-ee!”
Gordon zigzagged between two cars, turned right on a red light after a second’s hesitation. “This is Truman,” Gordon shouted. It was the same road Marshall had taken into town, but he was experiencing it differently now. He decided to let out a big breath and trust Gordon’s driving skills.
“You see that Saturday Night Live skit about Prince Charles wanting to be his lover’s Tampax?” Gordon shouted. Every third word was lost in the wind. Gordon seemed to realize this. “Prince Charles. Camilla Parker-Bowles: Tampax!” he shouted. “Saturday Night Live.”
“I did, actually,” Marshall said. He was slightly surprised that his brother remembered Prince Charles’s lover’s name. He hadn’t remembered that himself, though he did know what he was talking about: the woman gets a gift from the Prince and it turns out to be a Tampax with Charles’s head talking at the tip. Maybe everything and everybody was just fucking crazy. Maybe riding on a motorcycle with Gordon made as much sense as anything else. Wasn’t that exactly what the recondite McCallum would do, hooting with pleasure? Sonja, herself — apparently she liked a wilder time than she let on.
The motorcycle veered right onto Whitehead, steeply banked as it cornered, a few blacks on bicycles looking up as the two men roared past on the big black Harley, one clinging to the other’s shirt as if it provided a secure grip, the driver hunched over, barrelling forward in yellow aviator glasses and a backward Mets cap, shirt billowing. He slowed for a red light, then coasted through, accelerating when he passed the intersection. “Oo-ee!” Gordon hollered. “Hate to return this baby.”