A Solitary Blue (12 page)

Jeff ate his sandwiches, drank juice, and watched the slimy underwater stalks of the grasses grow visible as the tide ran out. He sat on the floorboards, his back against the side, watching and listening. A rustle of wings announced the arrival of one of the great blue herons. The bird landed a few yards up from the boat and proceeded to walk along the water's edge, its long beak pointing down. The bird's legs, more like pipes than legs, bent backwards at the knee, so it looked like the bird was going backwards or was trying to go backwards when it was actually moving forward or like it could only move forward by going backward. Every now and then it would halt and stand motionless, then plunge its beak into the shallow water, shake its head two or three times, and swallow its catch, whole.

The blues were always alone, Jeff had noticed. They came at low tide to fish along the edges of the marshes. They stalked the shallows, their flat, elongated, triangular heads facing down, to where their prey hid. This blue hunted up about a hundred yards, then backed up until he stood camouflaged against the grasses. The blues were big, awkward birds on land; in flight they spread long wings out, tucked their necks in against their chests, and trailed their legs out straight behind them, looping across the land or the water.

At the end of the afternoon, Jeff rowed back down the creek, then along up to the dock. The last bus to town left at sunset.

It was a week before he actually landed on the island, tying the boat up to the poles of an abandoned dock that sat beneath the overgrown lawn of a burned-out house. There, the steep mudbanks were inhabited by land crabs. Their holes, as large as fifty cent pieces, made the steep brown banks look like swiss cheese. The crabs came out into the sun — to eat, Jeff supposed. When he had first seen them, from a distance, he had thought they were large beetles, and not until he had come so close that they scurried back into their holes had he recognized them. The first time he landed, Jeff watched the crabs for a cautious half hour before he brought the boat close enough to tie up to a piling. As he had deduced, they scrabbled quickly into holes when he set his foot on the mudbank and scrambled up its slippery surface to the weedy lawn.

For several days, Jeff stayed around the shell of the house,
venturing up across what must once have been a well-kept lawn, where bushlike trees were overgrown with vines and the Spanish moss on the live oaks grew down to the earth like old men's beards.

Gradually, hampered by the occasional day of rain, Jeff explored inland, along a double rutted path he found leading away from the house. The tangled woods closed in over him, low myrtle bushes, palmettos at various stages of their life cycle, honeysuckle, pines. These days he wore jeans over his swimming trunks and a long-sleeved shirt, because the mosquitos bit mercilessly in the dense woods. He left his hat at the boat — the sun couldn't penetrate much into the semitropical growth. He walked along cautiously, a dead branch in his hand, and his fear at the strangeness and solitude never entirely left him.

He discovered a pond, a long, narrow pond so large it might have been considered a lake. Sitting at its side to watch a chameleon, his hand waving away clusters of gnats, Jeff saw a log moving on the shallow bank opposite: an alligator, as brown as the mud beneath the grasses, slipped into the water.

Jeff leaped to his feet and ran, thundering along the now familiar path. Heedless of the noise he was making, he ran until he had climbed back into the safety of his boat. An alligator!

He sat on the wooden board, his head held in shaking hands. An
al
-ligator. He was sweating. His chest heaved. He'd never been so frightened in his life.

After a while, the sun made him so hot he stripped off his shirt and shoes, then his trousers. He lowered himself gently over the side of the boat, paddled for a minute, carefully keeping his feet from touching whatever might be on the bottom of the creek, and then hauled himself back up over the side, cooled.

An alligator. Gees. He'd never thought — He'd thought of spiders and snakes and even snapping turtles, but never alligators.

One of the songs he'd heard the woman in the cabins singing had an alligator in it: “When a gator hollers, folks say it's gwina rain.” Jeff ate lunch in the boat that day and then rowed to the dock. He got back to the city in time to look up alligators at the library, to see how much the appearance of the creatures might curtail his exploration of the island.

He should have gone straight to Gambo's, as it turned out, because Melody was there. He didn't know that at first, entering the
cool hallway and picking up the Friday note from the Professor. He didn't hear her voice, just the television. He opened the note, read a postcard from Brother Thomas about brass rubbings, unfolded the sheet of yellow legal paper, and pocketed the ten dollar bill. This note was longer, three lines of bold, slanted script. “I expect you in a couple of weeks. Let me know the day and time. Sold a book — imagine that — I'll tell you about it.”

Only a couple of weeks. Jeff guessed he could manage that, and he thought he would feel easier once he got back to Baltimore. At that thought, the spacious indifference of Gambo's house to his presence started to swell out from his belly and threatened to take him over. “Sold a book,” he said loudly within his own brain, “I wonder what that means.” The Professor sounded excited, for him. Jeff thought maybe he would write the Professor a postcard and ask. He thought maybe he would go out right then and get one to send. And a stamp, he reminded himself, feeling his tension abate as he planned out where he would go to get them.

But just then Melody came to the head of the stairs. “Jeffie?”

Jeff didn't have the power to just get out. When she stood there, so close, her voice unsure and asking him, her hair curled around her beautiful face, it took all of his strength not to run up the stairs and throw his arms around her. “Hello,” he said.

“Come on up, Jeffie. I want to talk to you. Privately.”

She went into Jeff's room, where only the brush and comb on the bureau and the picture of himself stuck into the edge of the mirror showed that anyone lived there. He had put the picture up to remind himself — of what, he did not know, but when he looked at it the cold, wet feeling inside him froze to ice and was easier to handle. Melody sat cross-legged on his bed. She spread her skirt over her knees and patted the space beside her. Hating himself for his inability to resist her and to resist an insistently happy feeling, Jeff sat down. But he wouldn't look at her.

“Oh Jeffie.” She put her hand under his chin and turned his face toward hers. “It hasn't been the way you wanted it to be, has it.”

“It doesn't make any difference,” Jeff said. All he had to do was remember how badly she had hurt him and he would be all right.

“And I'm going away again tomorrow, and you'll be gone before I get back,” she said, her voice sad.

Jeff couldn't stop himself from asking. “Do you have to?”

“Yes, of course; would I go if I didn't have to? Max is going to do an article on an Appalachian community, on rural poverty — but don't tell Gambo that” — she smiled into his eyes, mischievously — “she think's I'm the one doing it. What she doesn't know won't hurt her. But what have you been doing? Oh, I've missed you and thought about you all the time,” she said.

Jeff knew he couldn't believe her, but he wanted to believe her so badly that he did. “I could take you out to dinner, just the two of us.”

At that she laughed and hugged him, pleased. “You do love me, despite it all. But we can't. It would hurt Gambo's feelings. You don't want to do that, do you? She has only us, you know that.”

Jeff nodded.

“So we have to stick around here tonight, even though it would be good to have just the two of us, just this once. But what have you been doing all this time? Miss Opal tells me you're out of the house and she doesn't set your place for dinner unless she's seen you. You're not getting into trouble, are you?”

“No,” Jeff said. He opened his mouth to tell her about the island and the boat and the black families in their houses beside the back creek.

“You should have come with us.” She didn't give him time to speak. “We were up in the mountains — well, the foothills — and it's a wonderful countryside. The pueblos are a disgrace, outhouses, garbage. Whole families live in one room where the smoke isn't ventilated. When I think what we've done to the Indians.” She went on and on about New Mexico and what to do about the Indians out there, how much help they needed; Jeff listened and did not let himself think. Because she didn't even mean her questions to him. At last, she wound down. “Are you awfully sad to be going back to Baltimore?” she asked. “I always was.”

Jeff looked over at the picture on his mirror.

“No,” he said.

“Jeffie, what a terrible thing to say — after all everybody's done for you. I hope you don't talk to Gambo like that, it would break her heart. It breaks
my
heart a little, truth be told.”

Something burst inside Jeff. “Don't lie to me,” he said to his mother. “I don't believe you. If you really cared you'd have stayed here, and you wouldn't be going away tomorrow and lying to Gambo
about it, and — ” He was making her angry, he could see that. But he couldn't stop. “And I don't like the way you lie. You make it sound like the Professor is so terrible, but you're terrible yourself. What you do to people,” he said. “Lying to them so you'll get what you want.”

Big tears rolled down Melody's cheeks. Jeff didn't mind that. He got off the bed and went to stand by the window.

“I've made you unhappy,” Melody said. “I'm so sorry, Jeffie.”

“I'm not unhappy,” Jeff lied. “I just don't care.”

“Like your father.”

“Don't say that. Don't say it that way just when you want to criticize me. He's not so bad.”

“Well, what do you think of a man who lets you nearly die of pneumonia because he just doesn't notice.”

“Bronchial pneumonia.”

“Bronchial pneumonia, plain pneumonia, what's the difference? I don't know how you can stick up for him. It just goes to show — ”

“Show what?” Jeff asked, angry himself. He'd never had a fight with anybody, and it felt oddly good.

“Show how men always take their own side. I should have known better than to try to get you down here, but I felt so sorry for you — stuck with him and sick and nobody noticed, I cried myself to sleep when I first heard. I thought I could at least help you a little — but men always stick to their side.”

“That's stupid,” Jeff said. His voice was loud in his ears.

She jumped off the bed and stood with her hands on her hips. “Are you calling me stupid? You don't know anything, do you? You don't know anything about the world; he hasn't taught you anything up there in his ivory tower, safe and secure, not about the dangers or what really goes on, not about the way some people have to live or what we're doing to the world — and you call
me
stupid. Well maybe I am, I was surely stupid to marry him, that was about the stupidest thing I ever did. Unless having a boy wins the prize. I wanted a girl. You didn't know that, did you; but you should have figured it out. If you're so smart. If you'd been a girl I'd have taken you with me when I walked out on him. I thought you were a girl when I got pregnant, I was sure of it.”

“Oh yeah?” Jeff answered right back. He didn't know what to say to show her that he knew she wanted to break him into pieces.
And he could see that; she wanted to hurt him, as badly as she could. Then he thought of something. “Well, Max told me why you got married, because you had to. So don't go blaming me for anything. You probably lied to the Professor too, he probably isn't even my father.”

Jeff wondered where that idea had come from, where in the icy black spaces inside of him that idea had been hiding.

Melody's hand went to her throat. Her eyes were huge and gray. “That he is,” she said, her voice cold. She wasn't saying it to make Jeff feel better, he knew that. So he knew what she was saying was true. “I'd never had married him otherwise, if I hadn't had to. You can bet your boots on that.”

Jeff said the only thing he could. “Go away. Please, go away.”

She went. Jeff stood at the window for a long time, so angry he felt he was shaking, all the little pieces of himself he had so carefully tried to put together broken again and rattling around inside him. Sorrow welled up in him again, and he was frightened. He had thought if he could just say what he thought, if he was just strong enough to do that, then he'd be all right. But he wasn't.

But he made himself go down to dinner, because Gambo might have her feelings hurt, and there was no reason for him to do that. He figured he could get through dinner with Melody, somehow. Nobody noticed much about him anyway; they'd probably miss noticing how upset he was.

But at the table Melody pretended nothing had happened. She sat next to him and kept trying to hold his hand as if nothing had changed between them. She was putting on an act for Gambo, about how much she loved Jeff and how much he loved her.