Just a dream, like everything, but the nights were disjointed.
I’d wake up dizzy—uncertain whereabouts. A malfunction of compass. I couldn’t get my bearings; I felt open to injury.
“Easy,” Sarah would say, “give it time.”
She was tender with me. Uncommonly careful, and caring. In the mornings, before the heat set in, she would often lead me on long winding strolls through Old Town. The pace was slow. She was tactful, never pushing. Along the way she pointed out the local flora and fauna, many gulls and flowers, exotic trees, fish bones bleaching on white sand. We’d go arm in arm down Margaret Street, then left on Caroline, past Cuban restaurants and conch houses, then right on Duval, where there were crowds and drinking establishments and young girls in halters and headbands and young boys with long hair and bruised arms, then down to the waterfront, just walking, often resting, watching the shrimp boats and fishermen and tourists. Mildew smells, I remember. And salt and gasoline. There were jugglers and magicians at Mallory Square. There was an old man with an iguana on a leather leash. There was no war here, but there was bright sunlight and water, so we’d walk until we were hungry, then we’d stop for fish cakes at one of the outdoor cafés. We’d hold hands under the table. We’d be silent, mostly, or else talk around things, admiring the temperature and the shadings of color in the sky. Later, at the house, we’d nap or read, then take a swim, then oil up our bodies and hide behind sunglasses and spend the late afternoon soaking our toes in the Gulf of Mexico.
On the surface, at least, it was a holiday. R&R, Sarah called it, but she skirted the hard topics. She did not mention her new friends. She did not venture information as to why we were here or what her plans might be or where the trends might take us. Except for a few late-night phone calls, there were no contacts with any outside network. There was an odd passivity to it all, an absence of endeavor. Too lush, I thought. Too remote. The immense quiet and the afternoon heat and the slow island tempo. Where, I wondered, was the resistance? And why Key West? And what next? There were these questions, and others, but I was not yet prepared to frame them.
I concentrated on convalescence. Day to day, just idling. A good time, mostly—a family feeling.
Tina Roebuck performed home economics, toiling over casseroles and desserts that flamed. “Health begins with nutrition,” she’d say. Then she’d chuckle and tap her belly: “Balanced diets make balanced minds.” So we’d sit down to nutritious meals, Tina in a brightly colored muumuu, Rafferty in gym shorts, Sarah in almost nothing. The talk was family talk—Tina told McCarthy stories, Rafferty went on at length about his garden. After supper we’d play Scrabble or Monopoly, or watch television, or go dancing down on Duval Street, and although I’d sometimes feel myself slipping away, space walking, the others were always there to give comfort.
September was neither here nor there.
On October 1, my birthday, Tina baked a cake. There were candles and songs, and it was a happy occasion until I felt the grief. I excused myself and went out to the back patio and watched the sun go down.
Later, at twilight, Ned Rafferty joined me. He was still wearing his party hat. He smiled and showed me a bottle of rum and two glasses. For some time we just watched the dark. Ocean smells, and a breeze, and we drank the rum and listened to the crickets and tree frogs.
“Anyway,” he said.
But then he shrugged and fell silent.
Behind us, in the kitchen, Sarah and Tina were doing dishes. I could hear a radio somewhere. When the moon came up, Rafferty took off his party hat.
“You know,” he said softly, “we’ve always had this tension between us, you and me, but I wish—I mean, it’s too bad—I wish we could be friends. A treaty or something. Here we are.”
“Wherever here is,” I said.
Rafferty stirred his drink with a thumb. He seemed pensive.
“I know the feeling. Hard to connect sometimes, but you shouldn’t think—you know—you shouldn’t feel alone or anything. You shouldn’t. The Benedict Arnold disease, it’s one of the hazards. We all grew up saying the Pledge of Allegiance.”
“I’ll live,” I told him.
He nodded. “No doubt. But if you need to talk, I’m not such a terrible guy.”
“You’re not.”
“Just a fuzzball,” he said, and smiled.
He filled my glass.
A nice person, I thought. I wanted to tell him that, but instead I shifted weight and examined the sky. The radio seemed closer now, and louder, and for a while Rafferty hummed along with the Stones… just no place for a street fighting man.
Then he stopped and looked at me.
“You’ll learn to live with it,” he said. “Guaranteed. At first you get the jumps, that’s normal. You feel like J. Edgar Hoover’s on your tail, Feds and G-men and all that, but after a while you realize, shit, it’s a huge country—a free country, right?—and they can’t track down every Tom, Dick, and Harry. They just can’t. Not if you follow the rules of the road.”
“Don’t jaywalk,” I said.
Rafferty smiled at me.
“That’s one rule. Don’t jaywalk. Don’t ask a cop for directions. Not all that difficult. If a guy wants to get lost, he gets lost. Easy.”
I contemplated this. The rum was doing helpful things.
“Fine,” I said. “Lost-wise, I’m shipshape.”
“It gets better.”
“Sure it does.” I looked at him. “What about you? How’s your lostness?”
Rafferty laughed. “So-so,” he said. He picked up the party hat and put it on his head. “A goof, man. What do I know? Dumb jock. Long line of fuzzballs.”
“Not so dumb.”
“Dumb,” he said, and rubbed his eyes. “Hick. Grew up on a ranch. Like where the buffalo roam. All I ever wanted—that old home on the range. Deer and antelope. Dumb, you know? And now this.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Here,” I said. “How come?”
He was silent. He stood up and moved over to his garden, peeing with his back to me, then turned and came back slowly and lifted the bottle and said, “Motives. Who knows? Real jumbled.”
“Sarah?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Sarah. Classy lady. Much love, but that’s not… This rad shit, it’s not me. Politics, I hate it. Humphrey, Nixon—who cares? But here I am. Sarah, sure. The right thing, I guess. The war. Not a nice war. Very tangled. So do the right thing… Dumb jock. The right thing, I think. Dumb. So what’s the right thing? Down inside I’m all red, white, and blue. Fucking Republican, you believe that? True. Many misgivings. What’s right? Motives, man, I don’t know. I walk away. Real brave, real dumb. No more home on the range. My dad says, ‘Hey, where you going?’ so I tell him, I tell him it’s the right thing, and my dad gives me this long look—he’s got these eyes you wouldn’t believe, like Gary Cooper or somebody, these no-bullshit eyes—he looks at me and he says, ‘Pussy.’ That’s all he says. My old man, he wasn’t pleased. Didn’t think it was the right thing.”
“Parents,” I said.
Rafferty rolled his shoulders. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “parents.”
We proposed a toast to parents. I told him how my mother kept packing socks and towels, how we couldn’t really talk about it, not straight on, just the logistics, socks and towels and haircuts. Like a game, I told him. Like it wasn’t real.
“Right,” Rafferty said, “like that.”
“Parents.”
“Unreal. That’s the thing.”