That girl’s big pretty eyes would fill up with tears when she talked about birds. She told me to respect them because they live their lives so close to dying.
So do us all, I thought, and that was no surprise to me. It was her inventions that was a surprise and she had started in on them the first day. She never made me pretend to be things I wasn’t. Only things I was. But I believe we went through a hundred changes the days she stayed with me. We didn’t have costumes or nothing naturally but it was like we were playing other people doing things. Though all the time it was us. I was a gangster and she was the governor’s daughter, you know, or I was a bombardier and she was the inside of the plane. Or I was a preacher, maybe Methodist, and she was a babysitter. And even her dog did it because sometimes he was like a whole other object, you know. Or like he became a feeling in the shack and quit being a dog.
She messed up time and place for me. And just with her, I felt I was loving the different women of a thousand different men. We just went on for five days with them inventions and never did the same one twice. She’d go off sometimes in her fancy car, I don’t know where. I’d lie there while she was gone, not even able to move hardly nor sleep neither. Lie there with my eyes open, trying to think what was happening, listening to the sound her car made traveling over the bridge and it was like the bridge went on for miles it was the only car I’d heard traveling for so long. There were four silver pipes sticking off the end of that car. I never seen anything like it. I was trying to think, but never once did I think about her not coming back. She always come back.
On the fifth day, I went down with her to the beach. First time I been out of the shack. Hotter than a poor shotgun. No wind. We was walking over the bridge to the beach when she said, This isn’t a drawbridge. It’s a solid piece. There isn’t any grid. And so what do you tend, I’d like to know.
Well, of course it ain’t a drawbridge. Did she think I’d been here for all these years paid by the country, here every day with no vacation and never no real quitting time without knowing that the goddamn thing wasn’t a drawbridge?
I didn’t say nothing but just gave her a look telling her that she should tend to what she knows about and I’ll tend to what I know about.
The beach was full of eggs. She kept steering me around so I wouldn’t step on them. All them eggs cooking in the heat and the birds going crazy over us as we walked along. Diving down and screaming, shitting on our heads. I went down to the water to get away from them. I was still put out with the girl and wasn’t paying her any mind. She was trotting up and down the beach, slaving like a field hand, writing things down in her book. Finally she run right by me and fell in the water. Tried to tease me in. Took off her suit and tossed it in my face. Skin there like the cream in a chocolate éclair. But I paid her no mind. That day was so white my eyes ached. I was floating and felt sick. All that sun, it never bothered me before. She come out and sprinkled water all over me from her hair and even that wasn’t cool. It was hot as the air. I was mad because I felt she was thinking my thoughts weren’t real. But then I said, Come on, I been without loving too long. Because I thought her loving would pick me up. And we went back to the shack, me with my eyes closed and my arms resting on her because it hurt so bad looking out on that day. It ain’t never been that bright here before or since.
So we went back. And I was a professor and she was a dance-hall cutie. And I was a big black lake and she was a sailboat tacking over me. But that night she and that dog was gone.
There are sharks, I know. I seen them rolling out there. And the bars sometimes are tricky. They change. Fall off one day where they didn’t the day before. But it don’t really seem dangerous here. I just don’t know where she went to. Leaving nothing except that car, which like I say is sort of fading out. Rats building their nests beneath the hood. I hear them in it when I walk close.
So it’s over but I can’t help but feel it’s still going on somewheres. Because it hasn’t seemed to have ended even though it’s stopped. And I don’t know what it was she gave me. Maybe she even took something away. And I don’t really even know if she’s dead and it’s me sitting here in the pilothouse or if I was the one who’s been dead all the while and she’s still going on back there on the gulf with all them birds.
Souvenir
This is in England, in Cornwall, and a more weird dreary spot could scarcely be imagined. Nevertheless, tourists were beginning to arrive in ever-increasing numbers because they had been everywhere else. The inhabitants of the place were in many respects peculiar, poor and cruel with extraordinary dark eyebrows, but the cream teas were excellent. The dogs were polite. The gulls were big, the crows enormous.
The weather was foul.
The graveyards weren’t as full or as mossy as those in Wales, the lanes not as snug. The cooking not as delightful; few turnips, no leeks. Actually, the dogs, though courteous, didn’t work as hard as the dogs of Wales. The ones without heads were the devil’s dogs. Even the most unobservant tourist had no problem in identifying them.
Most of the ghost stories in Cornwall involved ships and drowned sailors. And these drowned people, these ghosts, were always coming back, coming back to harass the living. Or to drag a beloved into the grave with them. Sometimes they came back to smile at their mums. The stories were a little tiresome.
In the old days, ships were always going down. The people on land liked it best when fruit ships went down. Oranges floated in. Grapefruit.
In King Arthur’s town in Tintagel, there was a big run-down hotel on a cliff. The drinking room there was called the Excali-Bar. It was for tourists. The locals wouldn’t be caught dead in the place. A group of travelers were sitting this night in the Excali-Bar drinking Adiós Amigos — gin, brandy, white rum, red vermouth, bit of lemon juice, shake and stir.
A frightful storm lashed the windows.
The locals were in the chapel eating pancakes because it was Shrove Tuesday. In a few hours Lent would commence.
The locals didn’t care for the tourists. Never had. As for the tourists, they were beginning to believe what they’d been told — that Cornish culture was nothing but ghost stories and meat pies. Not that they were here for culture. They were here for a bit of the odd, a bit of the creepy.
There were seven species of seagulls in the area. That was somewhat creepy. And a village called Lizard, an odd name indeed.
The locals had polished off their pancakes and were tidying up, preparing to play their Lenten prank. This year it fell to Paul and Paul, two old men. They staggered out of the chapel into the windy, rainy night and tottered along the cliff road to the Excali-Bar.
The travelers had stopped drinking Adiós Amigos and were now experimenting with Sheep Dip — gin, sherry and strong sweet cider, stir and strain. There were two boy hikers, several married pairs, three ladies from Ohio, a transvestite, and a French couple who sat apart (quite aware that the others were thinking…The French…The French eat horses but they don’t eat corn). The transvestite was having a quiet holiday alone, if you could say that a transvestite was ever quite alone. The imagination it takes to be one…It must be exhausting…