Christo was stumped. He asked for a drink of water. Tildy filled a glass in the bathroom. When she gave it to him, words stuck in his throat like wool waste in a clogged oil line.
Now she lit the cigarette. “But didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say I’d show you just how much of a bitch I could be?”
On her way to the airport Tildy had the cabbie stop at a farfetched downtown address. She told him to wait. What the hell, Christo was paying. Looie was waiting for her as she came off the elevator cage unbuttoning her blouse.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” she said, moving for the rear of the loft. “Roll me a joint.”
TAKE TWO
It may be that happiness lies
in the conviction that one has lost
happiness irremediably.
11
DIM AND MUFFLED MUSIC of the seasons. The moon half asleep in its phases. But even in the tropic zone there is winter, a collective downturn: Citizens put on weight, slept longer, reacted with unconscious gloom to the early arrival of darkness. Even lifetime residents who had never salted a driveway dreamed of toddies by a crackling fire and sleigh bells in the snow. Up and down the Sunshine State, people ringing in the New Year with banana daquiris.
But there was a hollowness that nagged here, a sense of borrowed mythology, like the canned apple juice and paper oak leaves of a New Mexico Thanksgiving.
Karl Gables wobbled down the gangway of the Miss Jenny Lee III holding one end of a cooler packed with fillets: Yellowtail, mutton snapper. Oscar Alvarado, retired tattoo artist, held the other end, and following close behind came Cocoa Jerry with a blood and fish scale-spattered baseball cap turned sideways on his head. Cocoa Jerry was drinking “shark repellent,” half vodka and half instant coffee. They’d been on an all-night charter party and everyone, including the captain, was pretty well plotzed. Everyone except Karl, who’d confined himself to ginger ale, saltines and, when no one was looking, a few chunks of bait.
Walking up the pier they argued over how to split the catch. Alvarado pointed out that it was his cooler. Cocoa Jerry pointed out that he’d supplied the ice and done all the gutting and cutting. Karl, who had boated only a few small ladyfish, kept his mouth shut.
“How about we roll dice?” Cocoa Jerry suggested. “Winner take all.”
Alvarado said he’d rather eat steak anyway and why didn’t they go on over to Bummy’s, see what they could peddle to the early morning jar heads.
Winter in Gibsonton meant party time. The carnies were on hiatus, filling dead time with noise and fast motion. There were card games, pancake suppers, dances at the Independent Showman’s Hall. And there was drinking, lots of it. The bars were always full of glowing folks exchanging lies and confessions, sighs and professions of love. Marriages broke and reformed in a matter of hours, lives were threatened and memories erased. Uncoverable wagers were made on the eye color of the next person to come through the door. And if all else failed, there was always shop talk, prospects for the upcoming season to be discussed and, inevitably, lamented. “When I came up there was two, three times as many shows goin’ as now. It’s the damn television that’s killin’ us.”
Bummy’s jukebox was sending out steel guitar breakfast music as Alvarado tugged the cooler inside and sat down on top of it, his head in his hands. Doc up in Tampa had told him he’d better slow down or one day his valves would blow out.
Karl arrived with a roll of aluminum foil (he’d left Cocoa Jerry heaving into the dumpster behind the market) and the two of them worked their way from stool to stool down the bar, hawking fillets.
“Not outta the water two hours,” Karl said, wrapping four pieces of snapper for Elsa Spitz, Queen of the Midgets. “Got all your vitamins.”
“I’m buying for my cats,” Elsa said, raking him with the same imperious sneer she gave the gawks from her little linoleum platform in the freak tent of Yester’s Family Circus.
“I been up all night, don’t go busting my chops now.” Alvarado was getting hassled over price a few feet down the line.
“It’s fuckin’ food is all, ain’t no investment. I’ll give you five bucks for that lot.”
“We didn’t catch these babies off the rocks, amigo. Kearny don’t take you out to the deep water for nothing, you know what I’m saying?”
“Ah … You dickhead.” But he came up with the seven fifty out of his change on the bar.
Bummy took foil packages, etched the proper initials on them with his thumbnail and shoved them in with the bottled beer. None of these rummys was going anyplace for a while yet.
George Beasle, who’d run for mayor back in the ’50s on a bars-never-close platform, announced that Mrs. Beasle made a superb fish chowder and he’d buy up whatever was left. The woman next to him pointed out that Mrs. Beasle had died of throat cancer well over a year ago.
“Thanks for squashing my deal, honey,” Alvarado barked.
“What are you, sick?”
“Shit, I would have thrown in my own cooler here for an extra ten bucks. Sound good, George?”
Beasle’s face spread out in a smile that was like time-lapse film of a blooming rose. “That’s right! She bought it, didn’t she? Well, damn, a round of drinks on that, Bummy.”
When Karl declared that all he wanted was a glass of plain soda with maybe a squeeze of lemon, there was widespread disbelief.
“Karl takin’ plain soda?”
“Karl Gables, the ferry man on the whiskey river?”
“Maybe it’s somebody just looks like him.”
“Nope, this is me,” he said. “But I done stared temptation down. I’m like that old horse you can lead to water, you know?”
“So what’s the story, Karl? Did you have a talk with Jesus or something?”
“Just the love of a good woman,” laying one hand over his heart. “A pearl of a girl.”
“Yes. Just this morning I purchased from your wife some bunion pads.” Elsa Spitz held up a stapled paper bag for all to see. “To me she looked run-down.”
A few blocks to the south, at the Medi Quik, Tildy examined herself in the antitheft mirror: wan and pulpy, skin like the white of an egg. What she needed was some prolonged exposure at the beach, a new haircut. Or maybe, maybe it’s an allergic reaction to all these beauty products, to the terminally sleek fashion faces of the merchandising displays, the bright package graphics.
Six and a half hours until quitting time. She moved down the aisle with her clipboard, taking inventory…. Q-Tips, cotton balls, eyewash, mouthwash, lip gloss, dental floss. She felt disapproving eyes on her. Ray Holstein, store manager, whose duodenal ulcer had forced his retirement as Oceola High basketball coach, was checking through the previous day’s receipts and hoping to find a mistake.
“Cindy. Cindy, can you hear me?” He could never get her name right. “You’ll have to step it up. I need that inventory by twelve thirty. I’m having lunch with the district supervisor.”
Hallelujah. Lunch with the D.S. would be the highlight of Holstein’s week. Not that he lacked suitable fear of a company superior, but the D.S. was someone with whom he could feel affinity, rapport. (Rapport — wasn’t that what team sports were all about?) They shared interests, could gab all afternoon about target shooting, marketing, home video equipment. They had the same tastes in sportswear. Holstein was desperately hungry for this kind of thing. He hated Gibtown and the people who lived there. He felt isolated, a lone sentinel of decent reality among stooges, chiselers, fast-talkers, the mentally and physically deformed. Every single one of them breaking some kind of rule: moral, behavioral, genetic. Holstein was a true believer in rules. He had once bounced his top play-making guard right off the team for wearing unmatched socks to a game.