The Serv-U worker with the white eye crossed their path. Where was Dale Coy, now? Ned wondered. He hadn’t thought about him in years.
“For about six months,” Ned said, “there was a black guy named Dale in our group, freshman year.”
“He left the group?”
“He did.”
“Why?”
“I don’t remember,” Ned said. But he did remember. He thought, Coy hated one of Douglas’s Christmastime song parodies like “It’s Beginning to Look a Bit Like Kwanzaa,” and Doug hadn’t spared the substitute Christmas promoted by Ron Karenga and the black nationalists in those days. But Douglas had done parodies of regular Christmas carols, too, lots of them. Ned thought, You can’t call everything that’s funny, funny, without losing friends.
He said, “We weren’t that enlightened about race. I guess we assumed that bad race incidents were destined to be like firecracker explosions after the Fourth of July. They’d get fewer and fewer and then stop.”
“I think that old man had a bleeding cut on his hand. There was blood on the wheelbarrow handle. None of them are wearing work gloves. It’s cold, too.”
“I could say something,” Ned said.
“I’ll remind you,” she said.
26
Nina was out in the rain again, with her umbrella, standing near the hump of rock she and Ned had been calling Moby Dick, and she was there because it was one of the few places she was sure of getting a good cell phone connection.
Her mother answered. It would be about seven p.m. there.
“Okay tell me,” her mother said.
“Everything’s okay. Everything’s working. I got here and nobody seems to mind.”
“Where are you staying? What kind of place have they got you in?”
“Well we were in a sort of dollhouse, which I liked, but now we’re moving to a new place in the main house. I just had a look at it. It’s a nice room, pretty big, like a good motel room, everything you need, except we have to share a bathroom with Ned’s friends Gruen and Joris. They’re in the bedroom next to ours. It’s a good big bed, and the room is built over a rollicking stream pretty much like Niagara Falls. Directly underneath us.”
“Oh that’s so good, Neen!” Her mother’s sudden enthusiasm puzzled her. But that was Ma.
“Why is it, especially?”
“Negative ions, don’t you know anything? It’s good for theum … negative ions are pouring up from the mashing water.”
“Okay.”
“You pay plenty to get a negative ion generator, a machine. You’re getting it free.”
“Do I have to inhale a lot perchance?”
“No. It penetrates by itself. You’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll feel wonderful, like running around, and Ned too.”
“Good. He needs a lift. By the way, we did it on time.”
“Thank God then.”
“And Ma, listen. I think that a couple of hours afterward I felt something new like a very refined I don’t mean refined I mean fine, as in … fine thing like a … fizzing, in there. I feel it right now.”
“Okay, I’m going to go out on a plank and say you did it.”
She wanted to believe Ma. It was sad, but she wanted her to be right. Her mother had called herself a dialectical materialist until she decided to learn astrology, which wasn’t a good fact to be thinking about now.
Nina said, “I hope you’re right.”
“I am. In your voice I hear something.”
“You didn’t used to believe things like this.”
“I still don’t. But I can do it. I got attuned. So listen to me for your own good. And by the way since you’re being smart with me I’ll tell you something else you have to do. You have to watch where you sleep from now on.”
“Oh God, what does that mean?”
“It means you have to be head north feet south.”
“Well if your head is north the only place your feet can be is south, right?”
“Okay, be smart with me. It’s alignment. If you grow carrots in a tray of dirt and grow them athwart the axis you get crummy short carrots but if you align the dirt bed along the axis you get tall sweet ones. And don’t laugh, this is in a decent book by a man René Dubos, an MD who was supported for years by that bloodsucker Rockefeller at the Rockefeller whatever it is medical foundation. So align your bed.”
“I’ll do my best. I’ll take care of it.”
“The march, howum,” Ma said.
“We’re still getting good news. How about you?”
“Don’t worry about Los Angeles, but something is wrong, I can tell, you’re not telling me.”
Nina sighed. “I’m trying to think of what it might be.”
Ma said, “You know.”
“Well the only thing it might be is the son of Ned’s friend who died, he’s a peeping Tom. I know this because he peeped at me. He’s fourteen or fifteen.”
“I knew it,” Ma said.
“Well, you didn’t know it.”
“You told Ned. Ned will take care of it. You be careful.”
There was more from her mother about the LA march. Lots of unions were in. Stars were going to be in it. It was going to be bigger than the Tom Mooney demonstrations, whatever they were. I can’t listen, Nina thought.
“The only other thing bothering me is that Ned’s friends haven’t signed his petition, and he cares.”
Ma was outraged for Ned. “What? Why not? What kind of friends? Get out of that place then.”
“I can’t. We can’t. There’s one in particular he wants to sign. So Dear Abby here’s my question: I could go behind Ned’s back and beg this person, which is what it would come down to …”
Ma was emphatic against it. She said, “Absolutely not. You’d have to make him swear never to tell and then it would be a secret and it would be like rubble under the bottom sheet you could never get rid of …”
“Ma you just convinced me.”
“How big a deal is it? I could run the cards. I know I know. But they help me think.”
“No, I said you convinced me.”
“You need to cheer him up. You know how. Get his mind off this.”
Nina laughed. “I know what you’re talking about but you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m wearing him out in that department, poor guy. When we get through with this he won’t want to come near my chocha for a year and a half. I can see it, Get that thing out of here, he’ll say.”
“You’re right, because of theum. Okay so forget that.”
“Okay, time to go, my cell is almost dead anyway. I have to go help Ned with our stuff.”
“Call me anytime,” Ma said.
There was an argument for trying to get some hijinks going here in the cabin rather than in their room in the manse. It was quiet and private in the cabin and it was mental up in the manse. There were interruptions. Ned was looking at her in a nice way. He had liked it earlier when she’d told him that the reason she’d first gotten interested in him was because he was so verbal looking. He had brightened up. But she had decided that easing up was the best idea.
Something was heating up Ned’s confessional impulses.
Ned felt he should peel the paper off the windows before they left the place. She wanted to leave it to Serv-U. He wanted her to help him. It wouldn’t take long. Ned uncovered the first pane and went rigid, staring out into the night. She knew what it had to be.
She ran to the cabin door, threw it open, and stepped out onto the little porch and shouted as commandingly as she could, “Come here, you, Hume, you come here. Hume!”