After he sets it down, he hangs around and we talk. Soon I start feeling the pressure ease up inside me. The beer jerker’s telling me about a catfish farm he wants to get going. It’s the big dream of his life, so we chew on it for fifteen minutes or so. Then he asks me what I do and, all clear headed, I start telling him about the winery. The one, I’m saying, I used to own. The funny thing is, it is the first time I’ve talked about it without being tight. For some time now I had equated sobbing and drooling into my whiskey glass with the running of a winery.
Now I am fresh and loose as sheets flapping in an autumn breeze in Maine.
I tell him carefully about how the thing used to run. I was recalling how much hard work and fun it had been, and I think he picked up on it. Then he asks me, if it was that good, why wasn’t I still there? In former times this would have been the cue to pull all stops. I’d learned a hundred ways to milk sympathy from some stranger, and the details of my personal tragedy got them every time. And, at that moment, more by habit than intention, I almost do the same thing again. I open my mouth to speak and suddenly feel the notion disappear. Of course it's all still there. It's picture perfect within my mind: how my wife Mary and our two boys — Brad was four and Danny was six — had got up early one morning and gone down to the city shopping. My birthday was around then, and I think they were going to get a present for me. Then I’m over in my warehouse moving empty casks around when Harry (who was chief of police in town) comes up crying his eyes out. It seems this car had pulled across the highway in front of our car and everyone was dead. The other folks, I found out later, had been to an all-night wedding shindig and were on their way home. I remember I kept thinking how, just before it happened, everyone in both cars must have been happy. They must have been smiling and feeling very pleased about things in general. I recall it was a beautiful day.
But now I only look at the bartender and say, “Change of luck, I’m afraid. You know how that is.”
He does and goes into familiar detail about some woman leaving him for another guy, and what he’d do if he ever ran into them. But I’m polite, letting him finish before I get the hell out of there.
The next thing I know I’m back at camp, but nothing looks right anymore. It’s like, after bringing Dick around, nothing’s the same anymore. So I leave again and just go walking. I end up at the Moonwalk, which is this elevated boardwalk overlooking the Mississippi. Behind me is Jackson Square and the Pontalbas, and, what I do is, I spend the rest of the night there. Just sit there and think. I recall how I’d moved in with Harry and Alice for a few days before I took off. I woke up one morning and felt short of breath. I sort of stumbled about the house, not being able to breathe properly. I was gone before Harry got up to start the coffee. Damn her, I was thinking now. Damn her.
In the morning I’m there watching the light appear around me. The ferries start crossing the river, and there’s a mist hanging over the river and through Algiers. In the square behind me people are starting to come out. The pigeons are sitting on Andrew Jackson, ruffling their feathers and yawning. The French Quarter streets pull away in either direction. They look low and mean and very lovely in the gray mist. Now I’m seeing this motley little faubourg with all its cracks and humps and distortions, and I know it’s not telling all of the truths about itself. That would be too painful, I guess. Its mask is affixed, and it wakes up each day and slowly stretches and doesn’t say too much about yesterday. Then there’s the carts rolling in on their wooden wheels, and the rosy faces having breakfast over at Royal Orleans, and I know it’s all right and I can lean back again.
Alice, I’m thinking, always had a good sense of timing and was always dangerous to be around for that reason. She encouraged you to do things where you knew damn well the odds were stacked against you. Like the time she talked Mary into going up in one of those gliders. Now high heels usually made my wife dizzy, but there she was one day, floating all over the valley, with her instructor before her and Alice in one right behind. Harry and I were sitting out on my patio having scotch and sodas when they went over. I couldn’t believe it, but they sure enough tipped their wings before heading up-valley again. Harry and I laughed like birthday boys when that happened.
But that was Alice. She reminded me of Lucille Ball, except she kept the whipped cream in the can. I couldn’t imagine her now, slowing down, but I could figure she still had something left. After all, she dug up Bob Blue and sent him to me. When that came to mind, I knew I suddenly wanted to talk to her about it. About all of it. It was a nice thought, us sitting out on the porch, chewing the fat. It was such a hell of a nice thought, all right. Talking with Alice again was a challenge that suddenly appealed to me. Seeing her again. I didn’t see it as a question of having paid one’s dues, but I knew this was the first thing I had really wanted to do in some time. It was not a routine motion. It was a quest. After that, it was only a matter of keeping my ass out of those gliders. I guessed she would have one tucked back somewhere.
So I call up Dick and tell him it's a go. There are a few things I have to do, I tell him. Want to turn over my route to Leo, who's this mildly retarded Quarter fellow I know. He scrounges cans but doesn't have the sense to organize. But this would be set up, and otherwise Leo is very professional. Then I have to pick up my things and say adios to a face or two.
“I’m going with you,” says Dick.
“That’s not necessary. I’ll meet you at the hotel.”
“Look, canman, you’re sitting in my new Monte Carlo.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be there shortly.” And I hang up on him and get busy. I spend an hour or two making the arrangements and doing my tidying up. Leo is pleased as hell with the offer and is hugging me and promising me the world he'll take care of my, or his, cart. Since Leo is one of the world’s great amateur spray painters (always catching the can sales at Ben Franklin’s), I picture something in translucent blue with wheels akin to Joan Crawford’s lipstick. I hurry on, giving the nod to Brother Marti, and he holds out, one last time, that squatty little Coke bottle of his. And so I take it, thinking it may be the appropriate memento to my time down under.
Back at camp, things are not so cheerful. Duke and Reese are there, having made a thorough inspection of the place and my possessions and evidently not finding what they came after. They’ve finished off my final bottle of port, and Duke is telling me how they saw me wandering around the night before and followed me back. I look around and say, “So what now?”
Reese spits and hisses his displeasure. “This is it, you old geek. You got money hid here somewheres. You sold enough cans to go to fucking Panama. Where’s it at?”
“Mailed it off to my sister,” I tell him. “You know I do, Reese. You’ve seen me.”
“All of it?”
“All but necessities. I’ve got some pocket money you can have.”
“You sumbitch,” says Duke. “We don’t want no raggedy-ass dime ’n nickel. We want dem dollahs. Say, Reese.”
I stand there a moment, then make some idle comment about seeing what I can do for them. I start backing away when Reese lunges at me, and I take a swing at him with Brother Marti’s bottle. It comes down a good one across his head, and he hollers out loud and curses me. Duke is there, and I feel the bottle knocked away while his big arms come around me. It suddenly feels like an Oldsmobile is parked across my chest and I can’t breathe at all. Now they start dragging me off into the bushes with Reese hitting and kicking at me as we go. Then it crosses my mind about Alice, and I’m sorry, knowing she’ll believe, for the rest of her days, that her timing was off on this one.