Music of the Swamp (11 page)

Roy Dale said, “Jeff Davis can pull a condom down over his head.”

I turned and looked at Roy Dale in the weird green light of the storm sky. I said, “Get real.”

He said, “No, really. All the way down over his face. Ears and everything.”

I turned and looked up at the dripping ceiling. I said, “Caramba.”

Roy Dale said, “He pretends he's robbing a 7-Eleven. Mama won't let him use one of her stockings.”

I said, “That's really crazy, Roy Dale.”

He said, “Right, I know. You can smother with a condom pulled over your head.”

I said, “Caramba,” again.

He said, “I know.”

I said, “You would look pretty funny, you know, sticking up a store with a rubber over your head.”

Roy Dale said, “It would be on the ten o'clock news. ‘Two Caucasian males wearing condoms over their heads . . .'” We laughed pretty hard at this. We tried not to wake anybody up, but we were pretty tickled, I can tell you.

I said, “You wouldn't be able to talk. You couldn't say ‘Stick 'em up.'”

Roy Dale said, “You'd have to go, ‘Ump ump ump.'”

We laughed our damn heads off. We said, “Shh, shh!” And then we laughed some more.

T
HERE IS
not much more to tell. The storm outside was without wind and without lightning or thunder. The rain fell straight down and its falling did not diminish. The sound was constant, a pounding like heavy hammers that we could forget to hear. For a long time Roy Dale and I said nothing. He lay on his back, and I lay on my back. He did not touch himself and did not move. His breathing was soft and regular and I
thought again he might be asleep. In the stillness a thought came to me like a friendly voice. The voice said:
We are all alone in this world

Just then Roy Dale said, “Your daddy has got a rock-and-roll suit?”

I turned my head in his direction and could see his body outlined in the green light of the storm-sky outside the window. I said, “In the back of his closet.”

Roy Dale said, “So, like, what does he do?—like, puts it on and dances around, or what?”

I said, “I don't know. I don't think so. I think he just, you know,
has
it.”

Roy Dale said, “Will you let me see it?”

I thought about this. No one had ever seen the rock-and-roll suit but me. I sneaked looks at it when no one else was in the house. Still I said, “I guess so.”

Roy Dale said, “Great.”

I said, “We wouldn't be, you know, like making fun of him or anything.”

Roy Dale said, “No way. Uh-uh.”

I said, “Well, okay, yeah, sure. I'll show it to you sometime.”

Roy Dale said, “Tonight?”

I said, “Tonight?”

Roy Dale settled back on his pillow. He said, “You're right, it's a bad idea.”

I said, “No, its all right. We could do it tonight.”

We did not go out that night, of course. We only lay in the dark and in the sound of the rain.

In a while Roy Dale said, “Come on,” and the two of us stepped out of bed and moved quietly through the house and opened the cellar door. We were careful to wake no one. Jeff Davis might have called for the pumper trucks, the REO Speedwagon. Douglas might have wanted to be an apple. Cloyce and Joyce might have god-knows-what, in unison. Dora Ethel might have broken my heart. Roy Dale had a flashlight, which he shined into the darkness. At first I could see nothing, only the sturdy solid beam of light like a long pole. I followed behind Roy Dale, through the cellar door, down the steps, only two or three steps down before he stopped. He sat and I sat beside him.

Roy Dale shined the light out into the basement and I understood for the first time what I was looking at, not mere blackness but deep water. The basement was four or five feet deep in rainwater. Roy Dale swept the light back and forth across it. I might as well have been Hernando DeSoto discovering the Father of Waters, the mighty Mississippi, for all my amazement at the sight. It was an interior sea, an indoor elementary mystery as dangerous and filled with evil meaning as any cavern, any water-filled cavity of the underworld.

Then on the face of the deep I thought I could see something
else, some moving thing, or things. I imagined eyeless fish, I imagined mermaids, I heard their song. Roy Dale caught them in the beam of his flashlight. Earnest little faces and diamond-bright eyes, moving through the water, swimming for dear life, no doubt, but as if for pleasure. It was rats. A dozen or more of them. Large doglike barn rats, swimming quietly and without desperation along the black surface of this cellar sea.

Roy Dale said, “If Runt was awake he might let us shoot them with his pistol.”

We took turns holding the flashlight on their sweet earnest evil little comical faces. I thought of the collie-size rats at the town dump. They were burrowed deep in the garbage. They were waiting for the rain to end. I thought of that time a few hours from now, when this jungle storm would be finished. I thought of the Delta moon shining in the after-storm sky, with its ragged slow-moving clouds. I imagined the collie rats creeping from their hiding places in the rank waste-pits of human misery and into the soft air. I saw them sit along riverbanks and scratch behind an ear or shake rainwater from their fur. I saw the collie-rats look up at the miraculous moon and howl and bay at its light. They barked and sang like mythical beasts and I heard the little town of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, fill up with their strange rodent harmony. I thought of the swamp-elves, happy in their marshy cozy dens. The deer
bedded down in cane, the muskrats and the beavers and the ropey-whiskered catfish in the mud. One of us held the flashlight on the little swimmers while the other pointed a finger like a pistol and made pistol sounds—balooey, or ptoosh, or blammo!—and we passed the night in the belief that feeling love for each other and for this single incredible moment in time was all in the world that was important, and that it needed no acknowledgement, not even with a single word.

Later, when we had finished the game and only sat and shined the light onto the water, the old cat crept down the stairs and passed the two of us on the steps, first holding her tail up as she rubbed past, and then going all the way down to the last step visible above the surface of the waves. Roy Dale held the light on her, and we watched her test the water only once, briefly, one second, with one paw, before entering it in a kind of slow, mad cat-dive outwards, sploosh. The cat swam out into the cellar sea, holding her head high above the water and then relaxing some and swimming with confidence and ease. She was trying to corner one of the rats in the flood. Roy Dale and I cheered the cat. We shouted whispered directions—“This way!” and “Behind you!”—and we tried to direct the cat to individual rats with the beam of the flashlight. It was no use. The cat was a good swimmer but no match for the experienced rats. This was their home, and there were frequent heavy rains in the Delta. Finally she gave up and left
the water, back up the steps the way she had come, defeated and cranky and soaking wet, not even shaking herself to dry her fur. An apathetic, lazy, white-trash cat.

Roy Dale and I were finished. We were tired and sleepy. We turned off the flashlight and went back up the stairs. Roy Dale eased shut the cellar door, so that no one heard. We went to bed then and snuggled close to each other. I felt his rough white-trash alligatory skin against my own softer skin and was comfortable and drowsy and I listened to the rain and I knew that it was falling more softly now, coming to an end, and that tomorrow everything that had been thrown underneath my own home a few blocks away—the empty whiskey bottles, the soup cans and empty paint buckets, a dead battery, a hairless doll, a slick tire, scraps of paper, indescribable garbage, the ice pick my father once stabbed himself in the chest with while I watched him, the towels he bled into as his face turned white while my mother closed the window shades so that no one else would see—all this would have been washed out from under our house by the jungle rain. It would lie in the yard and on the sidewalk and in the street for anyone to see. And then my mother would gather it all up again and toss it beneath the house again, and again we would forget.

I moved my body close to Roy Dale. I reached in the darkness, afraid even to open my eyes, afraid he would disappear, and I held him to me. I embraced him. I encircled him.
We were like spoons together. We were like swamp-elves. And in this way we went to sleep, bare-assed children, the two of us, and in my memory not blameworthy for any sin and not even victims of the sins of our sad fathers, but, only that moment, in love with what is and what has always been or what might forever be.

A
FTER THE
hurricane, beach houses along the Gulf coast rented for a song, and so that was when my daddy got the idea of taking my mama on a second honeymoon. My mama said she never had a honeymoon in the first place, what did she want with a second one.

Daddy said they would take long walks and watch the sun rise and eat crabs and rent bicycles and browse in shops. He said they would put the zip back in their marriage.

Mama said, “Crabs! No way, José.”

Daddy said it would be like having their own private beach.

Mama said, “I don't know why you want to be riding on a bicycle.”

He said, “Come on, baby. Let's fall in love all over again.”

Mama said, “Well, all right. Can Sugar go along?”

Daddy said, “On our second honeymoon?”

I said, “I ain't studying no second honeymoon.”

Mama said, “I'm not going on no second honeymoon less Sugar comes along.”

Daddy said, “It don't seem right, falling in love all over again right in front of your own boy.”

Daddy was right about one thing anyway. The beach was deserted. It was worse than deserted. The hurricane had blown
most of the sand five miles inland, not to mention the hotels. The beaches were mud, the hotels were hideouts for murderers and swamp-midgets. Daddy said, “Well, wouldn't you think they'd have got this place cleaned up a little by now?”

We were standing on the beach, which was filled with dead fish and other animal carcasses, including a whale full of buzzards.

I said, “I'm scared, I want to go home.”

Daddy said, “That whale smells like Korea.”

Mama said, “Hush up, both of you. Are both of you boys trying to spoil my one and only second honeymoon?”

Daddy looked at me like: duh.

The little coastal village where Mama and Daddy rented the house was a ghost town. Everything was full of sand from the hurricane, even the trees, the ones that were left standing. And you couldn't go barefoot on account of broken glass, you might step on a piece and cut the living daylights out of yourself. It's hard to clean up after a hurricane. Buzzards flew up out of the whale like bats out of a cave.

T
HE SHOPS
were all closed, of course, and so were most of the restaurants. One restaurant still had a palm tree, roots and all, sticking through the busted-out front window. There was a coffee shop where we tried to have breakfast one morning, but the woman behind the counter slammed cups and saucers
around like she was mad at us. Daddy whispered to Mama, “I hope she ain't expecting the full ten percent tip.”

Even the parking meters had been stripped from their posts and stored away somewhere. Bicycle rental was out of the question, of course. And at night the house we were staying in, which was olive green with muscular mildew and alive with one million crickets in the kitchen cabinets and in the furniture and bathroom and light fixtures, foreign crickets blown in from Tahiti or Cuba on the hurricane, and fungi possibly from other planets, had buzzards roosting on the chimney like a gang of sea gulls gone bad, and it was the only place along the beach with any lights on. We were a lonely lighthouse, we were a ship lost at sea, we were an outpost in Indian Territory. We were one of the few places with a roof.

Mama said, “It's so quiet.”

Daddy said, “Yeah.” His voice was soft and a little frightened sounding. He said, “It's definitely a quiet little place.”

Mock it down: My parents were not falling in love all over again.

It's not that they weren't trying to fall in love. They were trying until they turned blue in the face. It was embarrassing to watch them, Daddy was right about that too.

They said soft things (I just stayed out of their way, I just watched, I just slunk around and spied on them), they brought iced tea to bed with flowers on a tray, they ate dinner by
candlelight on the front porch. Picture my daddy, with thirty-five years of housepaint under his fingernails and housepaint on the freckled, veined lids of his eyes, varnish permanent in the pigmentation of his skin, his hair, the color of his eyes, my daddy, with webbed toes on his feet and not one white tooth in his mouth, lighting candles for dinner for the first time in his entire life! It would break your heart to watch him, he was trying so hard to be in love, so desperate now that he knew he was not.

Daddy said, “Listen to the deep voice of the sea tonight.” He actually said this, this man who scarcely said hello on all the other days of the year, and the sound of his own voice speaking language near to poetry, near to passion, scared my daddy so bad that he actually leaped straight up off the floor in fear and ran out of the room and flung himself on the bed and cried for a full minute at the shock of it.

Whenever I long for the return of my own innocence, I imagine becoming the person that my strange daddy was in that sixty seconds of his life, and then I have to admit that I was never so innocent, even as a child, no one on this earth ever was so innocent except him. My parents walked on the beach in the moonlight, stepping over strange things they could not see, they agreed on many things, including autumn as their favorite season of the year, and the smell of salt in the sea air. My mother was even beginning to be convinced that this might work, this second honeymoon in search of love.