The Edge of the Gulf (5 page)

Chapter 9

By eight-thirty, Hudson was strolling through Laurel, his ostensible destination the little general store which doubled as the post office. Because the entire village was served by just five irregular streets from east to west and four even more irregular streets rambling from the beach on the south to the intersection of 26-A to the north, Hudson decided on a general walkabout in order not to arrive at his destination in less than five minutes.

He felt light-headed from the lack of sleep. He felt eighty-six, not forty-six. His eyes were dry and tight and his balance seemed a little off; he walked slowly and, until he found a gait, he had to watch his step. He heard Alex saying:
This is a really hard passage, Hud, but you’ve already started doing it. This stringing together of moments. Even as you let go of that cold but fairly reliable comfort of your will, you’re going to find yourself, well—melting, I think. It may be sloppy at times, but at least you’re going to be back in the picture and not merely trying to draw it from the outside. You’ve been “being” in some moments for the past year, you’ve told me so. In the classroom, with a friend or two, just here and there, a moment in your yard, sometimes when your writing really kicks in. Even a few with your crazy old shrink on his better days. Now, start stringing them together. The more you can let go and the more moments you can simply be in, the more they’re going to start moving again, running together. You say you like good watercolors. Well, buddy, you’re at a point now where your life becomes one.

Fat, cottony clouds bulked in the west. There might be a thunderstorm by late afternoon, but now the eastern sky pitched above the live oaks of Pendennis Street was a brilliant turquoise. Heading south, Moon trotted ahead on his soft leash, smiling at the world and looking back occasionally to confirm with Hudson the glory of this miraculously reincarnated memory. Ever the gentleman, Moon greeted with only a delicate, passing sniff the ancient, baleful-eyed bulldog waddling along with an equally ancient and baleful-eyed man. Hudson whispered when they were past: “Not really a proper beach dog, eh, Moon?”

They turned right on Eulalie, covered the short distance to Yaupon Lane and, instead of going left, south, toward the broad expanse of dunes and beach, went right again. Yaupon is the western boundary of old Laurel and separated from the houses on Pendennis by the tall screen of pines and oaks that rise behind the cottage. At a couple of spots along the road, between the houses facing Eulalie, Hudson could see the upper back porch of the cottage looking out into the trees. On the western side of the road was a long, slender lagoon, overhung on the west by a tall, impenetrable wall of trees. Bright birds swooped and sang in the sunlight; in the hot afternoon they would retreat into the shaded depths of the thicket and slumber until twilight. Two miles down the beach, on the other side of this old stand of scrub forest, out of sight and, for most Laurel folks, as out of mind as they could keep it, lay Greenside, one of the new breed of residential beach communities, with its gate, its developer landscaping, its enormous, suburban-looking manses.

After about a hundred yards, Yaupon Lane elbowed back into Pendennis. Hudson enjoyed passing the cottage again; Moon looked twice and seemed to find it odd, though not particularly vexing, that they didn’t turn into the walk. “You’re right, boy, but we’ll be back.” This time they went all the way down Pendennis, passing Eulalie to the right, and then, further along, crossing first Decatur and then, Hudson’s favorite, Lantana Boulevard. No more than twelve feet wide, Lantana had apparently gained the distinction of being a boulevard by being the longest lane in the village, making a broken-field jog through the cottages of Old Laurel at its broadest point of perhaps a mile.

Along the way, Hudson nodded or spoke to the few early risers who were walking or leisurely cruising on bikes. At one cottage, a sleepy young man sipped coffee with one hand while with the other he held a hose, watering a valiant, non-native bit of lawn; at another, a white-haired woman, whose name Hudson did not know but whom he recognized as a year-round resident, tended hardier indigenous varieties of hibiscus and laurel. It was hard to keep up with who-was-here-when unless you were one of the fixtures, like Charlie, who knew most of the year-round residents and many of the long-term visitors of each season. A newcomer, and now out of pocket for almost three years, Hudson knew only a handful of his neighbors, of either variety, and that might be enough. The illusion of intimacy, floating on an undercurrent of anonymity, appealed to him. At least for now, he thought.

Pendennis Street, like the rest of Laurel’s patchwork of wandery roads, was fronted by a hodgepodge of architecture, some only local-color quaint at best, but the majority, and the effect as a whole, unpretentiously picturesque. A few large, two-story houses of white-painted clapboard, with dark green or gray shutters, were set back in deep yards of tall oaks trailing Spanish moss. At the other end of the scale stood a do-it-yourself stucco horror from the early ’60s, fortunately almost obscured by palmettos and banana plants, which Kate had said resembled a large bratwurst. A few Old West Florida bungalows sported tall narrow windows with plantation shutters. Out along the water, of course, were some newer, larger beach houses. But most common in the village were the typical Old Laurel cottages, small but comfortable structures in various shapes and sizes from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, some a bit older, almost all of which, like Hudson’s, had been respectfully restored or renovated. On small lots, the cottages were built primarily of weathered shingle with porches, screened or open, across the front or along one side.

Though some of Laurel’s properties are owned by completely absentee landlords for whom they are nothing but prime sources of income, most of the cottages belong to people who enjoy them at least a few weeks of the year and, in many cases, as much as two or three months, or more. The year-round population is very small but, in recent years, steadily increasing. Except for the Canadian snowbirds who take places in the winter, apparently finding the sometimes chill weather a tropical paradise compared to Ottawa and Toronto, most people who live in or come to Laurel Beach are Southerners, either current or by consanguinity. Some have been returning for many years from as far away as up East, the Midwest, Texas—where parents or jobs or marriages have taken them—coming back, the Gulf still in their blood, annually calling them back from wherever the American economic diaspora has taken them. But most come from hometowns across the South, as close as Mobile and New Orleans, Tallahassee, Montgomery and Birmingham, and from farther afield: Mississippi, Memphis, St. Louis, Nashville, Louisville, Atlanta.

***

They circled out onto the beach, long enough for Moon to get in a decent romp, and then came back in on the east end of the short, if slightly wider, street modestly called Beachside, which, for all intents and purposes, is Laurel’s main street. What this means precisely is that on the north side stands the little general store and diagonally across, on the south side, the Blue Bar. The former was a rebuilt version of the one that the founding fathers had put up in 1890, the latter an amalgamated structure of varying ages that has been, at various times over the century, a restaurant, an inn, a store, and a dancehall. Under Charlie’s tutelage it had developed and sustained a good kitchen, serving lunch and dinner in its three large rooms, and boasted two great bars, both curving and long-flung, one inside and one along the back, on the deck that looked out over the dunes to the sea. Low-key and funky, the place had an atmosphere that Charlie had casually but carefully cultivated and might best be described as that of an old roadhouse by the sea. Folks strayed in from Santa Rosa and Destin, and even on the slum from Seaside, but by and large the Blue Bar, like Old Laurel itself, is something of a cherished, insiders’ hang-out.

The only other businesses on Beachside are Laurel’s
other
restaurant, the Comber, a nondescript fern-bar sort of place featuring a roof deck and indifferent Italian food; a small ice-cream parlor and bakery; and a gift shop cum beach gear cum art gallery. The owners of the Comber, a bland but perfectly pleasant couple from Pensacola, abdicated the scene every winter, and seemed to manage well enough by the summer overflow from the Blue Bar. The other two shops were open year-round, although the owners’ hours tended to become more and more vagrant as the winter wore on.

Hudson left Moon lolling by a tub of petunias and geraniums on the sunny porch and went into the cool shadows of the Laurel Beach Market, where a young woman stood behind the counter, leaning down onto a newspaper, a cup of coffee at hand.

“Good morning,” she said, pleasantly but without smiling. She straightened up and took a sip of her coffee. She was attractive in a quiet, understated way, early twenties, with large, intelligent brown eyes and glossy dark blonde hair, its wavy bob tousled and still a bit damp from her morning shower. “May I help you find something?”

“I need you to put on your postal service hat, if you will, and see if I have a package.”

“Sure. I haven’t looked yet.” She leaned over and pulled at an unwieldy bag under one end of the counter. “It usually comes in around three, but there’re things here from yesterday.” She knelt down beside the bag. “What’s the name?”

“DeForest. Hudson DeForest. It’ll be something the shape of a video cassette.”

“Yes,” she said, righting herself. “Here it is. I have to ask for an ID, please.”

As Hudson fished out his driver’s license, the girl glanced at the address on the mailing packet. DeForest House, 183 Pendennis. “Oh, the neat cottage with all the trees and those two big flowering…” she gestured.

“The lantanas that ate Cleveland, yes, that’s it.”

She looked at him intently, almost smiling now. “We’re neighbors.”

“Oh, yes?”

She extended her arm across the counter and Hudson shook her hand. “Hi. I’m Susie Cogswell. I’m spending the summer in the Sandiford place on Yaupon. It’s sort of kitty-corner behind you. I see the top of your house through the trees, and I pass it when I walk.”

Hudson wasn’t sure if the sightlines worked both ways, but he knew the only even partially clear view through the trees from his little upper back porch. “The dark green clapboard bungalow with white trim?”

He suddenly felt Laurel shrinking around him.

She nodded and looked eager, as if she had been located by radar on a desert island. “Did you just arrive? Are you here for the summer?” There was something charming in her open-faced directness, her interest, that kept it from seeming like prying.

“I came in day before yesterday. I’ll be here for six weeks, anyway.”

“Ah. That’s nice.” She seemed momentarily unsure of what to say; she didn’t take her eyes from Hudson, but she folded the newspaper, lay it to one side, and sipped her coffee. Lying on the counter, where the paper had been, were two books. Face-up was an old fat hardback collection, which Hudson recognized, of literary criticism; face-down beneath it and off to one side lay a paperback of O’Neill’s
Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
As she noticed his glance, he said: “And how will you follow these up for a
really
good time?”

Her face relaxed into a smile, for the first time, and it brought her lower face more into sync with the wide, bright eyes. She let out an involuntary little laugh. “I’m finishing up my master’s degree. Writing my thesis this summer.”

“O’Neill?”

“Carson McCullers. This is just…” she waved a hand over the formidable heap, “just something else….” She looked a bit like a child who’d been caught sneaking candy.

“Hmm. Thesis on McCullers, O’Neill and critical essays on the side. No moss growing under your beach umbrella.”

They chatted for another five minutes or so and the world grew even smaller. He confessed his own English major’s heart and that he was a teacher, she the fact that she was, before leaving for Tulane six years ago, a Memphian. In fact, she was an Elliott grad. (“I missed you by two years,” he said.) Her family had a time-share condo over in Destin to which they’d been coming for years, but she wanted the space to be alone and work on her paper before finishing up in the fall semester. Her grandfather was giving her half the rental on the Sandiford house as a master’s graduation gift and she was covering the rest with her part-time wages from the store. (“The Sandifords are here in the fall and spring and knew someone was needed. It’s great: I work four days a week, usually from eight to two.”) After the thesis and her orals, she planned to take one year off for “unstructured reading” and to decide if and where she wanted to go on for her doctorate.

Hudson finally said: “Susie, it’s good to meet you. I have to go now to do, as a matter of fact, some homework.” He wagged the brown mailer.

“A book?”

“Well, no. This is my other job. Considering what they pay me, you might almost say my avocation. I write about film for
The Buzz
, the weekly ‘alternative’ paper in Memphis. Well, you may know it. It had started before you left town. I enjoy it; and I alternate weeks with the editor, so the volume is manageable.”

In fact, a small press in Oxford, Mississippi, was bringing out a collection of his reviews. Hudson had always taken his gig with the paper seriously; he loved film and he had been weaned on Pauline Kael. Hence, the book review.

But he had been leery when the editor, a friend of a friend, approached him. “Are you sure the world needs another book of film reviews?” But the editor, a great film buff, persisted: “They’re more than just film reviews. They’re very good essays, they have broader cultural context.” His goal for the coming weeks—in addition to the new reviews every other week, and some reading and preparation for his fall classes—was to select, and in some cases re-edit or revise, his favorite columns, about two-thirds of the nearly three hundred from the past nine years. Hudson fully expected the proposed collection, an unglamorous, literary journal-sized paperback, to sell, perhaps, two dozen copies, but what the hell? His friends, his mother, his head of school, and the folks at
The Buzz
thought it was pretty exciting.