A Stranger in This World (18 page)

She went to the window and looked out to where the brothers were still draped around the picnic table, talking, though she couldn’t hear them. Two thirds of a moon, enough to see by. There was the house, and the yard, and then nothing, a dark field as flat as a pool table. At the far edge of the field was a wall of ragged forest, with wild palm trees standing up against the sky, black on black. My love, she thought, my love is down there, and fairly soon he will come up to me. He will sing in my window. Then stopped herself, closed the curtain, went back to her lonely bed and her mystery. This is not appropriate, she thought. This is not wholesome. But the words on the page all turned to bugs and refused to be read. There was this thing called love and it would not leave her alone. The weight of it. An afternoon on a beach in Turkey, a flat expanse of sand. You could land a jet on it, Greg said. Then the limitless Mediterranean blue, islands on the horizon like dream kingdoms and the cold sun outlining every muscle of her husband’s body, every grain of sand that clung to his skin like powdered sugar. Watching him as he lay eyes closed in the sand, an owner’s pride in his body. Candy’s sorrow was always mixed with desire: next to Greg in the sand, his sly hands, Turkish music from the Coca-Cola shops a hundred yards away, the blare of the tinny speakers hushed to almost nothing by the shore breeze and the surf. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nobody else on the beach, but the sand was so flat that they could be seen for a quarter-mile; out of the question,
but their apartment was an hour away. The girl she had been, when she was allowed that life: twenty, not beautiful but body-proud, ready to take risks. Greg pulling her toward the water, chest-deep in the Mediterranean, fumbling with her suit-bottom in distant sight of the Turkish families vacationing by the shore and then the feel of him inside her … and the weight of it, like water pouring down on her, and the sweetness. There were parts she was leaving out, she half-remembered them, but the sweetness was real.

She gave up on her mystery and poured another brandy for herself, two more, lining up the empty bottles like tiny rockets on the edge of the dresser. This night should be over soon. She would go to sleep, and in the morning she would be kind to Walter, and Jim would resemble nobody but himself. Her heart would not remember that it had ever woken up. Outside the window the cows were sleeping and the brothers were gone from the picnic table.

I will not stand for this, she thought.

Because she could still feel love inside her, like stitches pulling out. Because she had almost forgotten. Because she didn’t want to think about her reasons anymore. Because she wanted to. Because Walter was such a reasonable man, although at the heart of things this had nothing to do with Walter. He was like a man you might see out the window of a moving train, but she spared him a moment’s contempt as she brushed her hair out and smoothed her clothes: he was so safe! Safe as houses, she remembered. Greg loved to fly F-111s, almost twice the speed of sound.

Candy tiptoed down the carpeted stairs in her bare feet and shorts and he was still there in the kitchen, tipped back in his chair, drinking. When he noticed she was there, he aimed his glass at the screen of the television. “This is the most fucked-up movie I have ever seen,” he said. “It’s some sort of a pirate movie.”

Candy squinted into the gray light of the screen, where a pair of oriental men in striped shirts were driving around in an ordinary motorboat. Even the music didn’t make sense.

“Do you have any gin?” she asked.

“Around here someplace,” he said, without taking his eyes from the screen. The two oriental men were still driving the boat. Then it occurred to Jim that he was called on to act, and he shook his head like he was waking up. “Gin,” he said. “That would be like a gin and tonic, right? I’ll round one up for you. Just stay where you are.”

“Or a glass of wine,” she said.

“That might be easier.” He opened the refrigerator and stood there looking into the light, and it was quiet in the house, just the two of them. With Greg she was always moving, a series of one-bedroom apartments stacked like groceries. Their neighbors were always Air Force, just like them, but Candy and Greg had a plan, a future. Someday he was going to be a husband, getting his wife a glass of wine, standing in the refrigerator light … They had already decided not to have children till they were thirty-five. They were going to be selfish with their time. Thirty-five, she thought, next year.

Jim set a bottle of French wine on the table and started to wrestle it open. “I’m sure she was saving this for something,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll be in trouble in the morning but I’m in permanent trouble anyway.”

“What about me?”

“Below the radar,” Jim said. “Girlfriend of youngest son and favorite darling. You’re about sixty percent threat and the rest pure evil.”

“Well, that’s reassuring,” Candy said, taking a glass of wine from Jim’s hand, easing into the chair next to him. Now there were two boats circling around each other and somebody was firing a machine gun and she was watching with her husband. Drinky logic, she reminded herself. Three in the morning. None of this was real. But why should that matter? If her own pleasure was real—and it was, the warmth of his presence, even the way he sat so restfully in his chair—then did it matter if she could prove it or not? This wasn’t science.

She said, “The trouble is that I’m not tired at all.”

“Be daylight in about two and a half more hours,” he said. “The thing with cable—it’s always daytime someplace. Only difference is they show the dirty movies in the night instead of the daytime.”

“They do?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “It’s a regular Sodom of the airwaves.”

“Let’s see,” she said.

Jim looked at her sideways, and there was a moment when the whole thing hung in the balance. Candy had gone too far again, and again. And now was the time for him to turn into an adult and stop the game and make things safe again; she didn’t know what to hope for but this was what she expected. Then it would be time for apologies, she thought, embarrassment, regret. Time for the heart to go to sleep again, the heart that was awake and restless, the heart out looking for something to do. Candy braced herself.

But he only grinned at her. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?” he asked her.

“Shouldn’t you be horned” she countered. But this drew blood. She saw him flinch a little, angry, and without another word he flicked the TV over to the skin channel. A couple of girls were naked in a garden, playing with each other’s breasts and licking them. There was a lot of greenery and some running water and breathing. Funny-peculiar, Candy thought, not funny-hilarious. Is this what men want really? In the race between sex and ridiculous, ridiculous was clearly winning. That feels so good, the dark-haired girl said, don’t stop. But what if your husband comes? asked the blonde. I don’t care, the dark girl said, just suck me, suck me, suck me.

Ridiculous, Candy thought. At the same time, she was stirred by this fakery, down in her body. What if somebody was kissing her breasts right then? What if it was Jim? She thought of how good it would feel and thought of how lonely her body was and how much it wanted the touch of a man’s hand, Jim’s hand, and thought, That’s about enough.

“OK,” she said, “That’s enough.”

“This is the easy stuff,” Jim said, glancing from the screen to her face and back to the screen. “You should see the shit they put on here sometimes, I mean dicks and everything.”

He shut the TV off and the two sex girls disappeared to a little dot in the middle of the screen, then a brief flicker of light, like a ghost. In the sudden quiet she could hear the sounds of the night through the air-conditioning, the bugs and birds calling to each other. The loneliness of that mixed with the loneliness of her body. The thing was they were just calling out to the night, not to any one bug or any partner bird. They were just interchangeable, and this was where she felt the loneliness.

“I’m not tired at all,” she said, though her own voice sounded tired in her ears. Big girl staying out past her bedtime. Something happens when you get tired, she remembered from childhood: the world starts to crumble, sand castles. And then Jim turned to her, and the cocky tilt of his head, the half-smile he gave her wasn’t Jim at all but Greg, and she remembered what she was doing there.

“You want to go for a drive?” Jim asked.

“Sure I do,” she said. “I’ve only been in the car for two and a half days.”

“Does that mean yes or does that mean no?” he asked. “I can’t tell with you.”

“You can assume that I mean yes until further notice,” she said, and then quickly, before he could think about that, she asked, “Do I need a jacket?”

“Not till November,” he muttered, but he seemed distracted, like he was in a bad mood. And who could blame him? Sex and ridiculous, all at once, as she followed him out into the damp night. So much easier if she didn’t think about it.

And then they were driving in a convertible with the top down, drinking cold beers from a cooler in the back, a big plush ride. Candy wondered how drunk he was, exactly. It didn’t seem to matter. She wondered, if he crashed it, would she just wake up, or would she really be dead? And if she was dead, would she get to be twenty again, so she could be with Greg endlessly and perfectly with their perfect bodies … Everything was possible and nothing mattered. She could smoke as many cigarettes as she wanted to, if she could get them lit. They were following the headlights of the Buick down an endless straight zipper of a road that was elevated a few feet above the swamp. Off to the side Candy could see dark green and
dark water and sometimes eyes, glittering like jewels in the night.

“You boys love your big cars,” she said, the wind tearing the words out of her mouth.

“Yes, ma’am, we do,” Jim said, broadening his accent till he sounded like a Beverly Hillbilly. “We sho’nuff do love our big ole cars and our catfish and our Yankee cousins to tell us what to do.”

“I didn’t mean anything.”

“I know you didn’t,” Jim said. “I’m just an asshole.”

“What’s that out in the water there?”

“Alligators. That’s how you find them, when you go hunting for them—shine a light across the water and look for the eyes.”

“Then what?” she asked.

“Stick him with a harpoon, let him run out a line till he get tired of dragging the boat around, then hit him with a bang stick—shotgun shell on the end of a pole, you let it go right into his brain. See, it kills the brain but the rest of him don’t know it for a while. I was with a guy, he had a dead gator jump all the way out of the boat when it was on the trailer going back to the processing plant. Three guys trying to wrestle that sonofabitch back into the boat by the side of the road with the tail going back and forth and so on.”

“Processing plant?”

“Where they do the hides and the skull and the gator meat, you know. There’s actually a fair amount of money in it.”

“Is that what you do it for?”

“No ma’am,” he said in his hillbilly accent again. “I just do
it ’cause I have the gator blood in me. A man’s born to it or he isn’t and I was born to hunt gators.”

“Serves me right,” Candy said.

“Yes ma’am, it does,” Jim said.

Just then he turned off the highway into a bumpy dirt lot, so fast that Candy wondered if they were having an accident. There was a sign up but it was dark and she couldn’t read it. The big car bounced and heaved over the ruts and finally stopped at the side of a dirty white building. She saw beer signs in the window but they were all turned off. The paint was peeling off the building like a skin disease. Then he shut the headlights off.

Candy asked, “What are we doing here?”

“Junior’s 99,” he said, and leapt out of the car without opening the door.

Candy followed gingerly, looking all around her. A light was coming from somewhere, maybe the moon, enough to see the black water of the slough and the cypress trunks that rose out of it. There was a pickup truck in the parking lot but it looked like it had been there a decade. The building itself was patched with soda signs and propped with two-by-sixes to keep it from collapsing into the slough. There was a faint pink light coming out the dirty windows.

“I do not like this, Sam-I-am,” Candy said. “What country are we in?”

“It’s the 99 club,” Jim said distractedly, as if he were reading it off a card. “Drink and dance and romance since 1943. Enjoy yourself.”

He wandered through the door like he was moving underwater, and Candy followed him. The smell inside almost
knocked her down: cat piss, cigars, wet paper, some odor of illness or death. She was surprised to find that she could see when she got inside: six or seven jukeboxes, a pool table, a rough wooden bar with five silver stools and an oyster-colored old man in a patched green BarcaLounger behind it. Above his head was the sign:
WELCOME TO THE 99 CLUB DRINK AND DANCE AND ROMANCE SINCE 1943 ENJOY YOURSELF
.

“Slow night,” Jim said.

The old man grunted, stared at Jim through his Coke-bottle glasses. As he got to his feet—sluggish, Candy thought, rusty—she saw that he had a dirty cast on his left arm. With his good hand he reached into a cooler behind the bar and brought out a couple of cold beers and set them dripping on the counter. “It’s quarter to three in the goddamn morning,” the old man said.

“Was it better before?” Jim asked.

“No.” The old man went back to his seat and Jim opened the wet beers. No money changed hands. In the shadows at the end of the bar were three black men staring at them, not moving. The tips of their cigars glowed like fireflies in front of their dark faces, like the old men in Turkey—and again she found herself between the memory and the day, going with Greg into these scary places and trusting him, letting him do the thinking. Twenty-two years old, but she was still doing the same thing, except that she didn’t know Jim enough to trust him. A little warning bell of danger went off in her head, and something else, a memory that wouldn’t quite surface.

“What happens around here?” Candy asked. “What forms of recreation?”