“I just don’t want to spoil this afternoon.”
“Maybe it won’t.”
“Do I really have to hear it?”
“I think you should, yes.” She sighs. “You know that clam-handed old sawbones you were talkin’ to at the airport the other day? The one I came up and killed with a look?”
“I don’t want to know about you and Fincher,” I say. “It would count as a terrible part of my day. I command you never to tell me.” I stare at the swarming green sky. A small Cessna mutters across our airspace, seeking, I’m sure, a safe landing in Manahawkin or Ship Bottom, ahead of the storm. It does not seem a bit like Easter now, only another day without safeguards. Though the more normal the April day the better for me. Holidays can hold too many disappointments that I then have to accommodate.
“Look. I hadn’t been with that ole character.”
“Okay. That’s good to hear.”
“It’s your ex. She’s slippin off with him. The only reason I know is that I’ve seen her pick him up at the ER entrance three or four times. She’s got the light brown Citation, right?”
“What?”
“Well,” Vicki says. “If it hadn’t been he kissed her, I would’ve thought it was just innocent. But it idn’t innocent. That’s why I acted so peculiar at the airport. I figured ya’ll was about to fight.”
“Maybe it was somebody else,” I say. “There’s a lot of brown cars. G.M. made millions of them. They’re wonderful cars.”
“G.M.” She shakes her head in a teacherly way. “Not with your wife in ’em, they don’t.”
And for a sudden moment my mind simply ceases — which isn’t even so unusual, and there are times when nothing else will help, Sitting next to Ralph’s bed at the instant the nurse came in and said, “I’m sorry, Ralph has expired” (he was actually cold as an oyster when I touched his small clenched fist, and had been dead probably for an hour), at that moment when I knew he was dead, I remember my mind stopping. No other thought occurred to me immediately. No association or memory latched on to the event, or to the next one, for that matter, whatever it might’ve been. I don’t remember. No lines of poetry. No epiphanies. The room became like a picture of a room, though more greenish and murky for that time of the morning, and then it sank away and became tiny — as though I was having a look at it through the wrong end of a telescope. I have since heard this explained as a protective mechanism of the mind, and that I should be grateful for it. Though I’m certain it was brought on as much by fatigue as the shock of grief.
Nothing now grows smaller because of this unexpected news, though the air around me is tinged a stormy bottle green. The Chinese split-level maintains its ground in full view. Nothing has been thrown for a loop. I simply find myself staring across Arctic Spruce Drive at a chimney painted white, from which a gusty wind is drawing smoke at an angle perfectly perpendicular to the flue. All the draperies are closed. The grass out front is unspeakably green. You could putt on it and expect a good true roll to the cup.
I admit I am surprised; that the picture Vicki would like to paint of X kissing Fincher Barksdale in the front seat of her Citation outside the emergency room — when he is just off the cancer ward, smelling of disease and bodies — is as revulsive as any I could think of on my own. That the next scene, the one she hasn’t painted yet, of wherever the two of them are slying off to for whatever itchy plans they have, clouds up pretty fast — aided by the revulsion. At the same time it’s true I have to fight back a black hole of betrayal — for me and for Fincher’s wife, Dusty, which is totally unwarranted since she might not even care and I hardly know her anymore. This in turn makes me feel a sense of Fincher’s lizard’s depravity, which brings about more disgust.
But a thought I do not think. Nor contrive a mean and explicatory synthesis to formulate my position regarding what I’ve heard.
In other words, I do not exactly respond; except to remember: people will surprise you.
“I guess not,” I say agreeably, and stare off.
Vicki has twisted around to face me, her face above the split horizon of my two knees. She looks concerned, but willing to swap this look for a happy one. “So what’re you thinkin?”
“Nothing.” I smile, revulsion faded in me, leaving me only a little weak. I am glad I don’t have to stand up. The simple words “You cannot” come to mind, but I don’t have a finish for the phrase. “You cannot … what?” Dance? Fly? Sing an aria? Control the lives of others? Be happy all the time? “Why is it so important to tell me that just now?” I ask in a sudden but friendly way.
“Well, I just hate secrets. And I had this one with me a while. And if I waited any longer you might get to feeling so good that maybe I couldn’t tell you at all or it’d ruin your whole day. I coulda told you in Detroit, but that would’ve been awful.” She nods at me soberly, chin out, as if she couldn’t agree more with what she’s just heard herself say. “This way, you got time to get over it.”
“I appreciate your thinking about me,” I say, though I’m sorry she is such a spendthrift of secrets.
“You’re my ole pardner, aren’t you?” She gives me a pat on my knees and the grin she’s wanted to give me all along. It’s nice to see, in spite of everything.
“What am I again?”
“My ole pardner. That’s what I use to call Daddy when I was a little bitty thing.” She bats her eyes at me.
“I’m more than that, at least I used to be. I still want to be, anyway.” And I have to staunch a terrible tear that fills my eye like a freshet.
In some of the heart’s business there is really no net gain. Let someone who knows tell you.
“Why, you bet,” Vicki says. “But cain’t we be friends, too? I’m gon always want to be your pardner.” She plants a big fishy kiss upon my cold cheek. And up above me the sky swirls and tears apart, and on my face I feel the first serious drop of storm that’s all along been waiting for its time.
Wade Arcenault is a cheery, round-eyed, crewcut fellow with a plainsman’s square face and hearty laugh. I instantly recognize him from Exit 9, where he has taken my money hundreds of times but doesn’t recognize me now. He is not a large man, hardly taller than Lynette, though his forearms, exposed and khaki sleeves up for washing at the sink, are ropy and tanned. He gives my hand a good wet shake right where he’s washing. With a sly-secret smile he tells me he’s been “down in his devil’s dungeon” rewiring a Sunbeam fry-pan for Lynette to use to make Dutch Babies — her favorite Easter dessert. The pan sits splendidly fixed now on the counter top.
He is not at all what I expected. I had envisioned a wiry, squint-eyed little pissant — a gun store owner type, with fading flagrant tattoos of women on emaciated biceps, a man with a cruel streak for Negroes. But that is the man of bad stereotype, the kind my writing career foundered over and probably should have. The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being. And for a moment Wade and I do nothing more than stand and stare at the fry-pan’s drastic utilitarian lines like deaf-mutes, unable to get a better subject out in the open.
“So now how was the trip down, Frank?” Wade says with brusque heartiness. There is a frontier tautness in his character that makes him instantly trustworthy and appealing, a man with his priorities straight and a permanent twinkle in his eye that says he expects someone — me, maybe — to tell him something that will make him extremely happy. Nothing, in fact, would please me more.
“I came down through Pemberton and Bamber, Wade. It’s one of my favorite drives. I’d like to take a canoe in the Rancocas one of these days. Parts of Africa must be a lot like that.”