The Heaven of Mercury (18 page)

Finus looked at her. He'd forgotten for a second just where he was, forgotten she was even in the room.

-What does it matter now, anyway?

-See what I mean?

He caught sight in the corner of his eye now another face, looking round the doorjamb, a faded blue kerchief knotted above the brow.

-You better rest up, Creasie said to Birdie, unless you want to pass on in front of Mr. Finus.

Birdie flicked at her with a hand.

-Mm hmm, Creasie said, retreating. -Dinner be ready directly.

Meaning lunch, of course, and Finus could smell Creasie's unmatchable cornbread muffins and pots of greens and peas with okra and it made him suddenly hungry enough to stay if anyone asked.

-Stay and eat dinner, now, Birdie said.

He skitched his cheek at Mike to wake him.

-I'll run on, he said. -No need for you to get dressed. And he leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek, her skin soft and malleable as a plucked dove's, and squeezed her cold thinning hand, and her eyes had already fallen aside in a half-focused gaze of distraction as he showed himself out.

A
T THE BRIGHT
blurred window there was a shape, and a sound like pecking on glass. Finus reached to the bedside table for his spectacles, put them on, but the shape was just a flitting shadow, gone, maybe just a figment of his now cluttered and wayward imagination. He cast a cautious, sidelong glance at the stuffed chair in the corner of the room: his dead wife Avis was no longer there. She'd been there the night before as he lay in bed waiting for sleep, just sitting there looking at him with the stony gaze of the indignant dead, saying nothing but refusing his silent demands that she go away.

He hadn't slept too well. Creasie's call in the afternoon, day before, had set off all his memories about Birdie, now she was gone. -Miss Birdie's passed on, was all she'd said.

After a moment, he said, -You okay, then?

-Yes, sir. I'm all right.

-I'll take care of it then. You wait there with her.

-Yes, sir. I ain't got nowhere else to go.

He had called Parnell Grimes, let him take care of it. No need to go back out, see her like that. He'd have his last memory of her, alive.

He wondered now if he'd have some sort of Birdie vision, now that she was gone.

He lowered his feet from the bed to the floor beside the sleeping head of ancient Mike, scratched the dog's head, and shuffled into the bathroom. He stood over the toilet and made water, a pretty good stream, better since he'd been taking the saw palmetto. He looked into the mirror, gave himself a little upper body massage. A spry eighty-nine, he suffered the loose skin of the aged, as if it had been removed from someone larger, stretched and dried, then pulled over his old meat and bones like bad taxidermy. There was nothing to do but accept he was very old. He still walked every day, some days did a few half-push-ups and stomach crunches, and he gave up beer, it gave him such gas. Now he drank only bourbon and gin, and that in moderation. He could only be thankful. He easily passed for seventy-something. Most his age were long gone to the boneyard.

In the kitchen he poured himself a cup of coffee from the automatic coffeemaker he'd set to make coffee by itself every morning at four fifty-five. Outside the window over the sink, the courthouse lawn and the tall Confederate monument and the white concrete courthouse itself were just touched with the slanting yellow light cutting over the bluff to the southeast of town. Finus tasted the dark, bitter coffee and touched his fingertips to the window glass, already warm at this hour in late May. He heard clicking old claws and Mike walked stiffly into the kitchen and leaned his head against Finus's leg, stood there wearily.

-Good old Mike, Finus said. -You still tired? Dreaming them squirrel dreams? Wear you out, old boy.

The dog was fifteen years old, which made him even older than Finus in dog years.

Finus took his coffee to the bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed and let his parts hang over the edge of the mattress. His sac sagged like an old bull's, and he wore his britches a little low on the hips to make plenty of room for his equipment, whose function now was mostly to get in the way of crossing his legs. Inside his apartment in the Moses Building above the offices of the
Comet
, he often went naked in the mornings and after evening baths, as clothes were so restrictive and there was too much cinching up of critical parts. He had few visitors, none of them women. The triangular Moses Building wedged itself into the convergence of two streets leading to the civic enclave of the courthouse, its annex containing the sheriff's department and the food stamps office, an abandoned highrise parking lot that had failed in the seventies, and a row of shops trying in a desperately futile way to help revive downtown in the wake of the mall one mile south. The mall had been failing in its own hapless and inane fashion since its construction, also in the seventies, the decade during which it seemed to Finus that the entire country had seen a failure in terms of morals, economy, politics, and fashion.

At his age he was by some sort of osmosis as venerable in this town as the passing century itself, and was sometimes hailed on the sidewalk: Hey, Mr. Bates! What's the word, Finus! Slow down, there, Mr. Bates, you're moving too fast! And such foolishness as that. Finus bathed in it. There was nothing, he had once observed in his obituary for Adolphus William Spinks, a well-loved and longtime mayor, like local fame. It put the national and international variety to shame.

A watering in his saliva glands sent him shuffling to the kitchen for another cup and his daily ration of gin-soaked raisins, an arthritis preventive he thought maybe he'd picked up from Paul Harvey, though he wasn't sure. For all he knew, they were keeping him alive. He dipped his fingers into the jar and rolled or plucked out exactly nine and dropped them into his mouth, chewing while he rinsed his fingers, and then poured another cup of coffee. If that didn't keep the arthritis away, he'd help it out with a little Bombay on the rocks later on. Mike lay on the kitchen floor now, and breathed heavily when Finus came in, as if he found all this activity tiresome.

He sipped the coffee on the way back to the bathroom, set the cup down on the sink's edge, and sat down on the cool toilet seat, which made his pecker draw up like a catalpa worm. He set his feet apart on the cool tiles, hands on his knees like half of a serious discussion, and stared at the blank opposite wall, the nubble of plaster covered by a coat of glossy blue enamel paint. He waited. He ran a hand through through the thick white hair on his head, secure in the knowledge he'd take it to the grave, they were his immortal hairs, always warned Ivyloy to use his Kryptonite scissors on them, didn't want to dull or break the blade.

-I'll use the ones you brought back from Mars, Ivyloy once said.

-That'll do.

Finus detected now the smallest, most insidious of movement. He closed his eyes. What an ungodly business, a man should be afeared like Adam, terrified of this body our garden that contains the seeds of our own demise, slow and cruel deterioration from God's own image—whatever that was or had been he was sure we were not made in it anymore. Not just the aged. Why did Genesis never once mention shit? Or did it? Finus reached his arm back and flushed, the old toilet roaring like a waterfall. He remembered his first indoor toilet, when they'd moved into town. He'd run down the stairs to see where it all dashed out, looked into all the rooms, expecting disaster, but they were pristine. That had to have changed the mental parameters of the human race, there. No doubt one reason primitives were nomadic was because they so befouled a place they had to move on, but no more—it all just disappeared. Now he pulled off a great pile of tissue to make a wad. Are you a folder or a wadder? he'd once said to a man he didn't respect. The man hesitated. That's what I thought, Finus said, and turned away with a dismissing wave. You had to let a man know when he wasn't acting right. Finus's friend and physician Orin Heath had once said, -Well Finus, you'll live as long as a sea tortoise if you can still take a good crap every day.

-That's my former life, Finus said. I know every inch of the Gulf of Mexico.

-You're deep all right, said Orin, it's deep around you, considering the subject.

-I know where the treasure is, down there on the old pirate beach, Finus said.

-I bet you do.

Finus whacked the toilet handle again and stood up. Done and hardly a stink. He took his cup back out to the bedroom, stepped carefully into a pair of boxers, and opened the dresser drawer containing his pants, all cotton khaki slacks cleaned and pressed at the One Hour Martinizing. He pulled on a pair, then selected a white Oxford short-sleeve shirt from the next drawer and angled his longish arms into the sleeves.

So he'd have to write two obits, today. Parnell told him, when he'd called about Birdie, that Midfield Wagner had passed on, too.

He finished dressing, turned off the radio, went into the living room and picked up the phone and called Parnell Grimes at the funeral home for a couple of details about Midfield and Birdie, then coaxed Mike downstairs for a little walk to the courthouse lawn across the street to do his business, then praised him up the steps again. The dog made his way back to the bedroom for a long siesta. In the kitchen Finus filled Mike's water bowl, shook out a few chunks of food from the sack, then poured himself a third cup of coffee, which he drank standing at the sink. He set the empty cup down in the sink, navigated the stairwell down to the street, and went out into the morning air. He allowed himself a glance at his reflection in the plate-glass windows of Ivyloy's barbershop, dust motes suspended in the slant rays reaching the chair and around the glass jars of tonic and oil. He'd forgotten to shave or comb his hair and his reflection showed him to look a little seedy. He stopped and took a look, ran his hand over his bristly face and over the top of his head. Maybe he'd stop back in at Ivyloy's before dinner and get a shave, a nice hot towel on his face. A good way to relax after writing a few things up in the morning.

He remembered the first time he'd seen Birdie. Small child astride a big short-haired dog that carried her slowly down a stretch of narrow beach along a peninsula that jutted into Mobile Bay, following an old spotted gray horse that clopped along in the sand, head down as if pondering. In the afternoon sun they made a picture both forlorn and comical. Where had she been going, a little girl astride a hound and following a downtrodden dray? He hadn't called out to ask. It was beatific, the way he remembered it now.

His family had been vacationing down in the old Henrietta Hotel on the Alabama coast. The day was bright and clear but blustery. By noon the sky turned gray and low, and soon took on a weird, greenish glow. He stood on the deck with his mother and father and grandfather while they looked at it and murmured to one another about it. By early evening the wind was blowing hard and then sometime in the night he was taken from his bed wrapped in a blanket and put into the back of a wagon with other people from the hotel and they traveled down the old road to the army fort at the end of the peninsula. There they were taken into the huge vaulted munitions rooms deep within the fortress walls where they and the Commandant and a group of soldiers sat around a wood stove, the soldiers and his parents and grandfather drinking coffee and talking while the wind howled. Finus fell asleep again with his head in his mother's lap in a little brick recess in the wall on which there had been piled soft blankets, and the wind howled him sweetly into dreams he forgot as soon as he woke the next morning.

It was a watery world around the fort, as he could see through still pelting raindrops from the high parapet where his grandfather took him to see. The marsh east of the fort was lapped with little waves, tips of tall sea oats just visible above them and the sky a gray soapy foam. Pines to the south and farther east waist deep in brown water, the clumped tops of the scrub oaks just showing. A group of officers in their ranger hats stood a few feet away from them, looking through binoculars to the east and pointing and talking.

When they went out in the long rowboats to look for survivors in the bar pilot village a few miles east of the fort, his father and grandfather let him go along. He sat beside his grandfather in the prow of the boat in which the Commandant sat with his father in the rear as two soldiers manned the oars. They launched at the marsh's edge, and rowed between the pines and around the clumps of scrub oak tops, in the lapping brown water and debris from broken limbs and here there the strange item, a floating washtub or wooden ladle, a well bucket, a floating length of swollen rope. An old steel gray and rusted buoy rocked against the side of a high dune as they neared the village. A sopped and pitiful rag doll, face-up and bobbing. Finus wanted to reach for it, but did not. The others seemed to glance at it and look away.

When they reached a place from which they could see the bay out beyond the battered piney dunes the boats slowed for a minute as the Commandant directed them to spread apart and search for survivors. One boat of soldiers headed out into the bay for the other side, where someone had seen something through the binoculars in the far trees. Another struck out farther east, to cut into the sluiced gaps of a flooded tall and broken pine forest, their tops cracked and splayed and gleaming yellow-white wounds luminous in the gray air. The boat with Finus in it turned to go straight inland at the village site, and they had not gone far when there was an exclamation from the Commandant, who stood up in the boat and hailed someone. Finus looked. A man on a ragged grass and sandy knoll stood up and gazed at them as if they were an apparition, and for a moment he seemed one himself, then he raised one arm in silent reply. And then sank to his knees.

-What are they doing out here, Pawpaw? Finus said quietly to his grandfather.

His grandfather, watching the man, said, -They live out here. Or did.

-Where are their houses?

There were no structures at all in this place, and mostly water, and little ground showing at all but for this knoll, and further on another two like it, where now other figures stood and hollered at them, waving their arms.

-Gone, his grandfather said. -The hurricane has washed them away. Out into the bay, maybe.

They took in the man on the first knoll and with him those left in his family, a woman and child and a man about the woman's age. The man who'd stood first was older, with a long white beard, and had raised one arm when he'd seen them because it was all he had, his other sleeve wet and pinned upon itself higher up.

He said, -An angel of the Lord sent you to come find us here. We thought we were lost. Some were, he said. His voice was high and soft and trembling.

In the seat just behind Finus and his grandfather in the prow, on the bench between them and the two soldiers rowing, was the little girl he'd seen on the dog. She sat in the woman's lap wrapped in a dry army blanket and staring at Finus with large, close-set watery blue eyes and a tiny mouth like the chirp of a bird.