And Yesterday Is Gone (11 page)

He laughed. “She's an oddball, all right. Just like you.”

“Strange you should be so knowledgeable about balls, considering you haven't any,” came her acid reply.

“At least I'm not a damn queer like you.”

“No, you're just a damn, drunken fool.”

She took my hand and, when the door closed behind us, said, “Dear God, dear God. How did I ever escape that? Poor Emily. She's better off.”

Sixteen years later Sara was a well-educated, beautiful young woman who met the world on its own terms. After three operations, the green eyes worked in tandem. Her lashes were tipped with the same gold as her hair. She flirted and danced the nights away with her numerous admirers, but they got no further than a hasty good-night kiss at the door.

Her pitiful yesterday was a memory buried deep beneath the bliss of today.

Then there was Dr. Theodora Hassé.

•  •  •

The next morning, Sara slept in.

As Teddy ate a hasty breakfast, she wished she hadn't encouraged Sara to see that boy. That may have been the reason that Sara tossed and turned most of the night.

Teddy stirred her second cup of coffee and stared off into space, her mind troubled.

Could she really mean her painting days are done? What a vacancy that would leave in her life. A well-known artist of twenty years hangs up her paintbrush? That can't happen. She's got to get started again, put her mind and her talents back to work, Teddy thought.

I never realized she wasn't happy with the light in that studio. She should have a room with windows on three sides—like the witches' turret in the servants' old apartment above the study, that old living room…

That fleeting thought opened the door of Pandora's box, and the ideas flooded out.

Excited, Teddy carried the embryonic plans with her to work and, at every available moment, her mind focused with amazing clarity on the image in her brain.

T
he stress, poor food, hard work and the ongoing fear of the last few months have taken their toll. And now the last close call with the grim reaper has left me weak and lethargic.

I hid in my linen closet and resisted all efforts at company or to coax me into any activity.

I slept, ate voraciously, and bribed a kid from Idaho to scrounge food for me. The only time I left my nest was to raid the kitchen downstairs or go to the bathroom. With the joints I rolled to perfection, I lulled myself into a state of false complacency to keep at bay the shock treatment of the real world, the ugliness that could exist and flourish—that I had sworn never to think of again.

The partying never seemed to cease. I felt totally indifferent to the screams of laughter, the riotous sounds of conversations and the twanging music of the guitars that slid in under the crack of the door.

One morning, barely daylight, my sanctuary was invaded. The door slammed open and Alfie stomped in. He reached down, yanked the blanket off my near-naked body and yelled, “What the hell are you doing in bed? It's past breakfast time. What's this I hear about you? I saved your sorry ass so you could lay around and do nothing? Get the hell up and let's go have something to eat, a cup of coffee.”

He grabbed me by a foot and dragged me out fighting for my security blanket.

“Take a shower. I'm gonna give you ten minutes, then I'm comin' in after you.” His voice was only slightly lower than the sound of a locomotive.

I was ashamed that he should see me like this. I was back with no time to spare. I knew he wasn't fooling and I was about half-scared.

Somebody had left a razor out. I ran that over my face and combed my hair with my fingers.

Alfie's voice boomed. “You look like hell. Pasty-faced, pot-bellied. I need some help down at the Diggers with these crazy flower children and I'm gonna expect you down there every day for at least six hours. Got that?”

•  •  •

Over the next couple of months, Alfie kept me moving fast. Everybody needed something. I never adjusted; I was a square peg in a round hole. I felt like I was a hundred years old. These kids—their protests, beads, feathers, tie-dye clothes, and total lack of responsibility and direction—were as noisy and colorful as a flock of chickens.

Everything on the radio was war news. After listening to the latest bulletin, half-stoned, I said, “Where in hell is Saigon? Why are we fighting a war halfway around the world? I'm not mad at anyone.”

“To stop the spread of communism, you damned pothead. If you'd leave that weed alone and come to life, you wouldn't be so ignorant. I'm going down to enlist tomorrow. I can always go back to school.”

Chastened by his irritated words, I said, “Well, I'll go with you and we'll both be heroes. Besides, I don't want to get drafted.”

“You may as well forget it. When they take your blood, they'll find it running green, so don't waste their time.”

I went with him anyway. Of course, they wouldn't accept me and I was pissed. Even Alfie was disappointed. He was deferred because he was a medical student with high grades.

“Go home and straighten up your life. Do you think your mother would be proud of you today?”

Shamed by Alfie's scornful question, I stayed clean for a while, then went back to give it another try.

The recruiters
still
found something—even I didn't know what some of those pills were that I occasionally got in a trade.

“Go home,” they advised, “and clean up.”

I felt a twinge of conscience, so to comfort myself, I said, “To hell with the war,” and lit up.

•  •  •

The nagging thought of home never left me. I didn't want to go back with my tail between my legs. And then there was my stepfather. I knew only one of us was going to survive if I ever saw him rough up my Ma again. His beer was never going to make it past the hole in his throat. A lot of water had gone under the bridge this past year of my life.

I moped around. Finally Alfie said, “Why in hell don't you go home? Go back to school, ease up on that damn pot—give your brain a chance. You think you're so much smarter than these crazies, do something with your life. You talk about your mother—make her proud of you. You're what she's traded her life for, so why don't you go home and face that bastard down like a man. You can always kick him in the balls if you're quick.”

His big black hand clapped me on the back. “Go home. You're fired; your position is terminated.”

I moved my head to hide the sudden tears. When I turned to him, he smiled and what I read in his eyes, made me know I could do it.

I wandered down to the pool and leaned back in a fancy deck chair thinking of Alfie and how he had saved my life twice. Watching a group of skinny-dippers in a pool as big as our backyard at home, I was strangely unmoved by the sight of naked girls; my desire was spent and lifeless.

My mind flashed back to the stocky, brown-skinned woman who had come to the barn with an egg basket on her arm, the musky smell of her warm body as it warmed mine and pushed against me, her teasing
“guapo, guapo,”
and how fervently I kissed those dark-tipped breasts.

The rosy glow evaporated. An involuntary shudder ran the length of me as I recalled the times she had risked her life for me. I prayed, as I sat in the midst of luxury, safe and warm, that she would get out of her situation some way, somehow, alive.

My eyes closed and I lay back, basking in the sunlight, only vaguely aware of the laughter and shrieks of the skinny-dippers.

Blue smoke curled around me and my mind drifted back to the last face I had seen before the hay covered me, the strained smile like a bad photo on his face as he frantically piled the hay over my prone body and prodded the sheep back. Juan had shielded my body with his to stand terrified and defiant against Carlos' murderous hand. But what was Juan's future? Surely Carlos had better plans for his only son, now imprisoned in that hellhole.

I felt humbled and ashamed to know in my heart that I had been so paralyzed with fear that strangers had done for me what I couldn't do for myself.

I lay there half asleep, my roach pinched off, when I sensed someone flop down in the chair beside me. I heard him inhale deeply, then ask, “Hey, Cowboy. How about a drag?”

Called back to reality, I opened my eyes to see that dude who'd driven the car in which I'd sneaked a ride.

“Sure, help yourself,” I answered and closed my eyes again.

“Damn, Cowboy, you always get the good stuff. Where you scorin' this primo? I think we were smokin' shoelaces last night. I'd give anything for a bag of this.”

I felt a stirring in my hazy mind. “Yeah? What have you got? What will you give for two bags?”

“All I've got are the clothes on my back, that old Buick you stunk up, and three hundred dollars. That car never used a quart of oil all the way across the country. It was my grandmother's and she hardly ever drove it. It's only got ten thousand miles on it and the rubber's good, too.”

“Yeah? Who put the other ninety thousand on it—grandpa? And I saw the rims showing through what rubber there was. I'll bet it would take a crane to lift the oil you've got in it right now.”

“Well, if you know so damn much, why did you ask? Might have a few miles on it—long ways from Maryland, you know. Guess I'll go for a dip and show these girls what a real man looks like.”

“Wait a minute. Have another drag—might be your last one before they drown you. Tell you what—put new tires on it, add your three hundred bucks, and you've got two bags of something that will make you think you hear the angels singing. You can probably sell some of it and get all your money back. And you're rid of that junk heap. Make your grandma happy, too. This offer is only good for twenty-four hours, dude.”

Before the deadline had passed, I had a bill of sale and some other papers tucked away with the remaining green stuff in the Baggies, a 1940 Buick with two new retreads, and a hundred dollars in my pocket.

I went over to the Diggers' tent to find Alfie. I gave him a hug and told him I was going home.

“Damn good idea, Cowboy.” He hugged me hard enough to dislocate my shoulder. I offered him a bag, but he gave it back.

“Don't use that shit. I'm goin' to the university studyin' to be a doctor so don't need that shit to mess up my mind. If you're smart, you don't, either.”

“Fine. I'll sell it to someone who's gonna be a shoe salesman.”

“Do that,” he laughed, “but look me up when you need your appendix out.”

I had already changed the oil in the Buick and cleaned it inside and out. It sure smelled better—of course, so did I. I know that the angel riding on my shoulder on that fateful day nearly three months ago was grateful. I shuddered, remembering the insane crossing of four lanes of speeding traffic to reach the exit marked “San Francisco.”

Now that it was known that Cowboy had the good stuff, I stuffed my three remaining Baggies back in the lining of the jacket and used it as a pillow. I planned to leave right after breakfast, but I couldn't sleep. I was up before daylight.

Everybody was zoned out except for a couple of fellows wandering around in the hall. One asked me if I'd seen his bed go by; the other one said, “Hey, man, are we still in Saint Louis?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, and ran down to the kitchen. I drank a cold cup of black coffee, but couldn't bring myself to eat a forlorn roll that looked older than I.

The Buick purred like a Cadillac. Traffic was light as I found my way back to the bridge and got on the freeway for home.

As I pushed the old car as fast as I dared, my thoughts wandered back to the five-acre farm where we had lived most of my seventeen years. All these years in that little faded frame house with one bath—and a privy outside that we used in summer. The house where my grandmother was born, that she had deeded to my mother as a wedding gift in a grandiose effort to impress the well-to-do family Ma was marrying into. Lace-curtain Irish, they were, from a thousand-acre wheat farm in the Midwest. Needless to say, they were unimpressed both with the gift and their son's choice, a wife they considered to be of the wash-and-wear variety.

Guess I was about nine years old, Sis almost two years younger, when our father was killed in a tractor accident. That event seemed to remove us from their Christmas mailing list.

I thought of Ma and the hardship of a young widow with two kids trying to make ends meet on a meager insurance check. She supplemented it by taking in washing, hoeing the neighbor's garden, doing their housework, and even milking their cows.

She joined a church, determined that Sis and I were going to be raised as Christians, and sent us to the church school—a very strict and expensive education.

Grandma said that Ma had loved to dance, but now she had traded her dancing slippers for boots and bib overalls. She was always so terribly tired, her curls were gone, and the fourteen-hour days showed in the lines on her face and the droop of her shoulders.

I think she married again because she thought Sis and I needed a father. I was twelve and becoming as rambunctious as I dared.

He was Dad's buddy, medically discharged from the Army. A war hero. Sis and I never did discover the exact location of his wounds, but later we laughed ourselves into hysterics when we figured he'd been shot in the ass when he ran the wrong way when the command had been to advance. Ma said I aggravated him. I sure tried.

He promised me a bike, and Sis all manner of good things that young girls love. Even brought Ma some roses that wilted overnight. Ma perked up and curled her hair.

I think he married her because she was a good cook, a hard worker, and owned her own home.

Then the justice of the peace declared them man and wife.

The honeymoon was over when Ma said, “I do.”

I never got the bike, of course. Sis was told to shut up about crap she didn't need. Ma was told in very uncertain terms to forget that damned foolishness about church school and put some new tires on the pickup.