“Wait here,” he told Jackie. “I’ll be right out.”
Big Gene lay sprawled on the living room’s sofa bed watching a television program. He lifted a beer can in salute. Joshua nodded at him, hurried down the skivvy-littered hall, and returned a moment later carrying a heavy-duty flashlight and a quilt.
“What’s that?” the big man asked.
“Flashlight. Quilt.”
“What for?”
“Clambake,” Joshua improvised, pushing open the door and nearly missing the first step. “Don’t wait up.”
“Fuckin’ fool kid,” said Gene amiably.
Joshua made a saddle of the quilt. Jackie, clutching the flashlight, climbed on behind him, and they traveled northeast along a desolate stretch of highway bordering the military reservation.
Palm trees surrendered to scrub, which in turn surrendered to kudzu, pine trees, and curtains of Spanish moss. In the shoals of summer darkness Alabama loomed up like a barnacled boat bottom. This was territory where, as late as fifteen years ago, backwoods entrepreneurs had erected billboards atop their filling stations and feed stores declaring, “We Want White Peoples Business.” Joshua had never seen such a sign, but Tom Hubbard and Big Gene Curtiss had vouched for their reality. A finger of apprehension drew its nail through the maze of his lower intestines. He wrung the right handlebar to increase their speed and shouted over his shoulder the news that they were almost there. Jackie squeezed his collarbones in acknowledgment.
A line of brick buildings opened out of the countryside like a stage set revolving into view. Joshua backed his hand off the accelerator and let the bike drift into a town with a solitary traffic light. For the past week a crew from Gulf Coast Coating, Inc., had been at work on the little town’s water tower, sandblasting its tank interior down to white metal and applying to every other surface a rugged primer.
The belly of the water tank glistened above them like the turret of a Martian war machine.
A fence surrounded the base of the tower, isolating it from the sleeping business district by a good fifty or sixty yards. Every ancient storefront was shuttered, and the traffic light rocked back and forth in a gentle, midnight breeze. Green, amber, red. Green, amber, red. The intersection was empty.
“You think this is better than your trailer?”
“More private.”
She put her chin on his shoulder. “You might as well have taken me to a tennis court or a football field.”
“Not down here. Up there, Jackie. Inside the tank.”
Her expression, softly starlit, did not change. She tilted her head to estimate the height of the tank and the difficulty of the climb. Joshua was pleased that she did not angrily veto his idea, disappointed that she did not seem more surprised. They had come a long way together, both tonight and over the course of the summer. He, she had admitted, was her fourth lover, whereas he had nervously forfeited his virginity to her amid a small range of sand dunes not far from Santa Rosa Beach. Jackie’s readiness to fornicate inside a metal globe one hundred feet above terra firma was probably far less miraculous than her willingness to fornicate at all. A Vietnamese by birth, a dutiful daughter, and “a good Catholic girl,” she ought to have been as chaste as a nun, but Florida had transformed her without really negating these attributes and now she considered herself an enlightened woman of the world. She insisted on embracing diversity.
“Very imaginative, Joshua.”
“Not for me. For me it was an obvious notion.”
They left his Kawasaki capsized in the grass, vaulted the low fence, and climbed the ladder to the catwalk about the tank’s middle. Joshua carried the flashlight in his belt and the quilt over his shoulder like a serape. As insurance against Jackie’s slipping, he brought up the rear, while she protested that because of the crap he was carrying he was the more likely to fall. Neither of them fell, but the climb made even Joshua dizzy, and they rested on the catwalk before proceeding up the hemisphere-hugging ladder to the hatch in the top of the tank. This time Joshua went first.
Perched on the hatch lip, he played the flashlight beam about the inside of the tank. Scale shone dully on the surfaces that had not yet been sandblasted, and the smell of chlorine, rust, and scoured metal made him hang fire. Maybe this wasn’t such a brilliant idea, after all.
“Go on,” Jackie urged him. “What are you waiting for?”
He descended into the tank. Nimbly, Jackie followed. Against one of the lower slopes, near the abyss of the tower’s riser pipe, they found an island of migrating sand from the blasting. Here, in a conspiracy of whispers and useless hand gestures, they spread the quilt. The butt of the flashlight struck the side of the tank as Joshua was working, and the resultant clangor was deafening.
“People drink the water from these tanks?”
“It’s sampled every month for impurities.”
Her face rendered gargoylish by shadows, Jackie glanced about at the slime and scale. “Ugh.”
It occurred to Joshua that if she could differentiate his face from the encompassing darkness, he must look even more alien than she—but, touching his chin, she leaned forward to kiss him. They melted like candles to their knees. They collapsed into each other on the floating surface of the quilt. Their flesh was warm paraffin, and in the blindness of their melting they were transparent to each other.
When Joshua was next aware of himself as a separate person, they lay side by side, naked and sweat-lathered. The Garden of Eden on stilts, that’s what the stinking water tank had become. The scale corroding the tank emitted not a stench but a perfume. Their bodies were relaxed, purged of lust, and no serpent had yet appeared.
“Nice.”
“Four stars,” Jackie said. “Highly recommended.”
“Let’s get married.”
She let these words echo a moment before saying, “Oh, no, Mr. Kampa. You are a bitter young man who’s not yet totally happy with himself. I don’t want to be the live-in private secretary who records your dreams.”
“I asked you to marry me. You didn’t even think about it.”
“I’ve thought about it many times. I just didn’t think you would ever ask me—Joshua, I’ve got other things to do.”
“Like what?”
“Have you ever heard of Mother Teresa of Calcutta? She’s a role model not many people have tried to follow. I think a lot about trying to do work comparable to hers.”
Joshua yipped like a chihuahua.
“I’m not kidding. It sounds ridiculous to you because you can’t imagine me undertaking a spiritual mission. A mission of mercy. That’s your problem.”
“I asked you to marry me.”
“I told you no, and I told you why. You don’t want to get married either. Think about these dreams you have, Joshua. The apemen in them—the apemen trying to become human—they’re the key. You want what they want, but you don’t know how to get there any better than they do. You’re perplexed and conflicted.”
“I love you, Jackie.”
“That’s your glands talking. Glands and gratitude. You don’t get married for those kinds of reasons. You shouldn’t, anyway.”
“Jackie, I’ve had these goddamn dreams since before I could speak. I’ve been ‘perplexed and conflicted’ since infancy.”
“That’s because you’ve got a mission, and you don’t know what it is yet.”
“You.”
“Fuck that nonsense.”
“How the hell do you know you’re not my mission?”
“Because I have a mission of my own. Otherwise, you know, I would not have been spared when so many others were taken.”