“I… WANT… SNOW!” June was winding down, her voice desperate and sore, and at these moments you had to feel sorry for her, for how much she exhausted herself.
But I had lost my focus. The woman and the cat were gone. Were they ever there? Automatically, I felt for the clumps of poodle toys in the coat draped over my knees, for protection.
“Ha,” said Stan.
The sign for the Holiday Inn had appeared.
“The girls can get a swim before dark,” he pointed out.
“I hear my scotch calling me,” Linwood concurred gaily.
They were always so happy to reach the end of the day. You wondered why we stayed on the road if they were always so anxious to find a comfortable harbor. We didn’t have to get up the next morning and go anywhere, but we would. Then, when the day wound down into twilight, they would sigh with relief, as always, as if they had accomplished something.
I was a child, and I didn’t understand the principle of staying in motion.
“The Fountain of Youth is in Saint Augustine,” Stan said.
Understandably, this attraction didn’t hold much appeal for me and June.
“I better buy a gallon,” said Linwood.
“Hell,” said Stan. “You still don’t look a day over thirty.”
Linwood smiled. “Oh, honestly,” she said.
“I’m being honest.” Stan clicked his ring on the steering wheel, he was so delighted he had pleased her. But—and this was such a regular occurrence you could practically tell time by it—he would go on and on, go overboard, until his exaggeration had succeeded in irritating her again. You’d think after all those years, he’d understand her a little better. “Twenty-five,” he amended.
Linwood gazed out the window. There were scattered houses, the first motels in the town: Sea Breeze, Ocean View, The Vagabond.
“Twenty-two.” There he went.
I would have kicked him under the seat except he would have ignored me, definitely.
“Twenty-two—if you’d let your hair go natural. Wear it long again.”
Linwood sat bolt upright, as if injected with a shot of helium. “Good God!” she said. “What on earth do you think you know about how I should look? Men! They get these sentimental notions about ‘long hair’—probably from some damn Bing Crosby song—and that’s that! No eyes in your head, just these half-baked notions of what you sentimentally think women should—”
“Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” shouted June, recovered from her sulk.
Sure enough. A lurid yellow billboard advised us that the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum was in Saint Augustine, right smack across from the Fountain of Youth.
I got the cold creeps just thinking about it. June always bought the books, reading outloud the parts about two-headed sheep who lived longer than real sheep, or precise replications of pre-Revolutionary Paris, constructed entirely from swizzle sticks provided by Harrod’s—“Reno or Bust!”—in Nevada. Naturally, the man who had built the model had also consumed the drink that went with each swizzle stick.
“Listen to this!” she’d say, and I’d get queasy even before she read it, from the ugly look of the book and the cheap quality of the paper. It smelled funny.
Actually, her attitude toward Ripley-type feats was totally in accord with her attitude toward the encyclopedias. The sensational. What she loved was that a billion meant dollar bills placed end to end, stretching four and a half times around the earth at the equator.
“We have to go!” June was even more worked up than usual. “Can we go tonight?”
Please no.
“I’m sure it isn’t open at night, June.” Stan’s voice had a steady, even tone. Although she was behaving again, she was still, as they say, at a combustible temperature.
“What if it was?”
“Well, then…”
“Oh boy!”
We passed a billboard that was delighted to inform us the museum would be open until nine every night, in honor of the holiday season.
“You can take them,” Linwood said. Her tone of voice clearly indicated her position on the subject.
“Actually,” I began. But then I stopped; my mouth snapped shut with sudden force, like a Chatty Cathy doll’s.
I had to go.
Destiny, in the form of Sammy, could be knocking one more time. There was always the chance.
“Actually what, Pet?” Linwood turned around. Her lovely face looked concerned.
Had my voice given me away? “Actually, that sounds like a lot of fun.”
Linwood watched me for another moment, then turned back.
My chest felt heavy. I didn’t want to think about any of that stuff, but where was the choice?
“We need to take the poodles in tonight,” I told June. “I want to check through their bags.”
Chapter Eleven
Stan dropped us off after dinner, right at the entrance. After double-checking the price of admission, he’d given us each an extra dollar. Of course, he didn’t know that we had quite a bit of money with us, mine cumbersome in the underwear pockets beneath my armpits, crowding the poodle toys and the magic book. June brought her money hoping that she could buy Stan and Linwood something really gross for Christmas so she could get to keep it herself.
I stood on the heavy stone steps a moment, watching Stan pull away in the pale blue T-bird. He said he was going Christmas shopping and would pick us up at nine, when the museum closed. The car tooled off into the flamingo streaks of sunset.
June was already inside the huge stone mansion. You could tell from the outside that the inside was monstrous: odd rooms and towers and staircases that led up to nothing. Fifth-floor doors that opened onto mysterious drops. Perhaps the grisly Mr. Ripley had spent his last days here, exhausted from his cross-continental travails, aged, with his last breaths, hobbling from room to room to survey the masses of weirdness he’d accumulated at what risk to his personal psyche. Whoever has the most things when he dies wins. Maybe he was right—maybe it depended on which things.
I shrugged and went inside anyway. No choice.
Was Sammy somewhere here, waiting?
“Speed it up, Lard Bucket!” June yelled from the other side of the ticket counter.
I counted out my three dollars and crossed over. No one but us seemed to be going in tonight. Perhaps this was not the right kind of festivity for the season.
June pointed to the map, prominent at the base of an enormous, curving marble staircase. “It’s by country,” she informed me. “Not by type.”
No comment.
“And the best thing is this.” June opened up the brochure that they gave you with the ticket. I’d already dropped mine. Inside was a picture of a grinning short man next to a glittering mass. The caption read: JOSEPH VON SCHMULO AND HIS CITY OF ANCIENT ROME, OVER FORTY YEARS IN THE MAKING, CONSTRUCTED ENTIRELY FROM THE PARTS OF BROKEN FOUNTAIN PENS.
Still no comment.
June shrugged. She knew I had no taste. “Okay. Here’s what you have to do—” She pointed at the map again.
I could never read maps. I’d wait until she was out of sight and then go ask the people at the information desk.
“You cover the South Seas, the Far East, and Africa. I’m going to do Europe, Russia, and North America.”
It sounded like one of our interminable games of Risk.
“What about South America and Antarctica?”
June squinted at the map. “You’ll pass through them on your way. What you have to do is make sure I’m not missing anything. We’ll meet back here at eight-thirty, and if there’s anything special, I’ll have time to go see it.” She was really excited. Her eyes shone behind her glasses, and her smile was genuinely pretty.