Waveland (23 page)

“They're keeping up the old ways,” she said.

“Why don't we get on the route?” he said. “We could get some milk, have them put it right here on the step.”

“You don't like milk, and besides, you can't have milk. I don't like milk. And he doesn't have the right kind of milk anyway.”

“You guys want to go see the fire?” Eddie said.

The next day Vaughn called Molly Maids and arranged for them to clean the house on Tilted Tree. He told them where the key was, told the woman on the phone that they should give it their best shot, price was no object he said.

“You want us to blow the place out?” she said. “I'll get one of my teams on it and we'll bust the place down to the paint. That what you want? It's expensive.”

“Ground zero,” he said. “I want that place spick ‘n’ span,” he said. “I want it to look as though nobody ever lived there. I want it to smell like a high mountain pass. I want it too good to be true.”

“Gotcha,” the woman said.

He spent some time reflecting on Newton, and he guessed he saw the error of his ways. They were family and that meant something—or it might mean something, or in some cases, under the right circumstances, if push came to shove, and with a little luck—well, theoretically that counted. He figured Newton would go on with his life in the Great Northwest, and he would go on with his life in the slums of the South, and from time to time they would talk on the telephone or exchange e-mail messages, but that finally they would remain at a certain distance and that was okay because Newton would never quite get Vaughn and Vaughn would never quite get Newton. Gradually, they would fade back into the backgrounds of each other's lives. They would become wallpaper, set decoration. His life would be Greta and Eddie and whoever else they might take into their little set.

And Newton would always be out there.

It struck Vaughn as odd that a person he'd known so long, who had been central to him for a lifetime, who had been there almost from the crib, became as an adult so far away, so inessential. It was as if Newton had become a member of some other family, like some guy he'd known in high school, or a kid from college, or a designer he'd worked with in an architectural office somewhere. It was odd that once their parents were dead, the rest of the family collapsed of its own weight. He figured it wasn't what was expected, or even what happened all that often. But it seemed to have happened to him, and Greta, too, from the look of things, and Eddie, though he wasn't sure about Eddie because people often had connections their friends never knew of or understood. He wondered if it wouldn't be a better idea to work harder to
make a friend out of his brother, to let the difficulties between them slip away, to overlook the parts of Newton's behavior he didn't like and try harder to find the things they shared.

If you were lucky in the world you built yourself a new life as an adult, complete with friends, lovers, partners, rivals, enemies. You replaced the old people with new people, and your party moved along effortlessly, dancing toward death. If you were unlucky you were left to float on the great angry ocean, never to hear the sound of wood hitting wood in the middle of the night in the darkness of the sea. Something like that.

Monkey got hit by a car and lost a leg. That was a stinking day. They had him at the vet for almost a week, and when he came home he could barely walk. But that didn't last so long, and after another week he was back at it with a vengeance. Vaughn spent hours practice-walking with him, and at night Monkey snuggled on the couch between them. They tried to console themselves with talk about his having had a good life before the accident, but there was no consolation to be had. “He's just another three-legged dog in a line of three-legged dogs stretching back to the Middle Ages,” Greta said.

“I like him better with three legs,” Eddie said. “We oughta get a sculpture of the fourth leg or something. Put it in the yard.”

“We can sure do that,” Vaughn said.

“I hate it,” Greta said. “I hate cars and people and shit-all.”

Gail called from time to time, and after a while she asked Vaughn to sell the house on Tilted Tree Lane, so he contacted a real estate woman and set that in motion, and the house sold quickly, which was a surprise to all of them. Gail had some people from Biloxi come and pack up her things and put them in storage. The sale price was good and closing went smoothly; and when all was said and done, he sent Gail her half of the proceeds in the form of a bank check.

“You know what you're doing yet?” he asked Gail in a telephone call one night.

“Not yet,” she said. “Things are in flux here. Things are changing.”

That was all. No further explanation.

“Well,” he said, “say hello to Teeny-Weeny for me.”

“What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said.

Vaughn and Greta settled into a routine. They stayed home a lot and watched television, ate take-out food, sometimes they played board games with Eddie, when he had nothing better to do, which seemed to be most of the time. The winter came and went, the second since Katrina, and they were fine. Their life was small but not unpleasant.

With his half of the house money, he bought the abandoned beach house where they had spent so much time squatting in the late fall. Fixing it up was a project, but he didn't mind. Greta was a good hand with a hammer, so the renovation went quickly. Before long it was livable. They moved out there, inviting Eddie to move back into the house on Mary Magdalene. This time he insisted on paying rent. He'd gotten
a job in town with the Veterans Administration—counseling kids coming back from the war. Vaughn thought he'd taken some night courses when they weren't looking and gotten some kind of degree. He had straightened up and he was flying right, and only after he'd had a couple of beers would he lay into the president, the government, the army, or anybody else who'd ever cost him anything.

Greta had a drafting table in the second bedroom out at the beach house and did all of her design work there. Vaughn helped out now and then, but mostly he worked on the house doing small jobs at a snail's pace. They gave up watching TV after a time. They got satellite radio and liked that—lots of different things to listen to—but pretty soon that stayed off most days as well. They worried about hurricanes, but the place was sturdy and they'd been able to get insurance, though the price was robbery. From a great distance they watched the tedious reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, which, eighteen months after Katrina, was still more or less untouched. The bridge across the bay finally got fixed. Land prices were through the roof and the only development going on was condo stuff, places in Biloxi for sale at six hundred fifty thousand to a million five, it said in the paper. Selling like hotcakes, it said. Vaughn thought he might go crazy being cut off out at the end of the world west of Waveland, being mostly out of touch, not working, not seeing anyone. He once thought everything depended on being in touch; but now, being of a certain age, he was comfortable not knowing much about what was going on in town, or, for that matter, in the state, or the country; though often they watched the news on television, and sometimes he'd read a story or two from the
New York Times
online. He felt guilty about falling away
from things, but there was also something about falling away that he found enriching, sort of like clueing him into something that felt like a bigger picture.

He and Greta shared their opinions about what they saw on television—the war, the government, the politicians, the way things were around the country, the tragedies featured on the news all the time, the bewildering atrocities, the stolen women and kidnapped children, the deadly fires, the mutilations, molestations, violations, cruelties, and car chases, the disasters of every kind, the malfeasances and misconduct, the men killing wives and wives killing each other, whatever came up night after night—but their views didn't go much beyond the kitchen table. He had trouble remembering the point of having all those opinions. What were they worth? What did they matter?

Some old dog came up to the deck one day and they petted him. He seemed to want to stay on, so they let him. He slept out on the deck for a while and then they brought him into the house and cleaned him up, gave him a name. They called him Fuzzy, because he was. He was some kind of mutt that looked kind of like one of those Australian cattle dogs—gray with black splotches all over him. He was smart, too. He had a sharp nose and good eyes. He watched everything Monkey did carefully, as if he were doing some kind of leg trick. He fit right in.

Spring was early as usual and they decided to paint the house. Greta wanted to use yellow ochre with white trim and Vaughn thought the house ought to be a strong burnt orange. They flipped on it and he won. So that's the way they went. There weren't any other beach houses out there—they were way to the west, pretty far out from the town, about
where they wanted to be. For a while Eddie came out all the time, but he got tired of that. Maybe they weren't interesting enough. He stopped showing up for dinners and they never saw him. Finally he came out and said he'd bought a piece of land in Pearlington, a tiny town halfway to Slidell, and he was moving over there. His work was taking him into New Orleans a few times a week, he said. There was still a lot of trouble there, and he figured he could help out.

So they put the house on Mary Magdalene Street on the market; there was no sense keeping it. Greta made some money on that because there were still so few livable places available.

Greta called him out on the deck one evening and asked him to sit with her the way they did when they first started hanging out at the beach house, before they bought it and demo'd and refurbed it. He thought it was a little odd because she usually didn't ask, she just went outside, knowing that he would follow sooner or later. But this was different. She had her tea and she was holding it with two hands, and she was not making eye contact. She was acting like a child and it made Vaughn nervous.

“Sure,” he said. “Let me get a drink and I'll be out.” He took a long look in the liquor cabinet, then the refrigerator, finally picking a drink called Grapette out of the fridge. They'd bought a six-pack of this stuff because Greta remembered it from her childhood. “It's almost art by now,” she had said.

“So, what's the deal?” he said, coming out the front door to the rebuilt deck. It was a pretty night, just going dark, heavy clouds in the west and behind them to the north, and lighter
ones out east. On the news the guy had said that weather was blowing in from every direction.

“Nothing,” she said. “I thought we'd sit a minute, take in the night.”

“Okay,” he said, pulling up a chair and squaring it away facing right at the water.

She didn't say anything for a few minutes, just leaned on the rail looking out toward the Gulf. After a while she turned her back to the water and faced Vaughn.

“I've been thinking,” she said.

“There's trouble,” he said. “I wish you wouldn't do that.” She smiled and he shrugged, as if to apologize for the lame joke. “You're making me nervous,” he said. “What's going on?”

She pushed off the railing and sat down next to him in her chair, taking a gulp of her tea. “I don't know,” Greta said. “I've just been wanting to talk more with you. You know, figure things out. Get things settled or something.”

“I thought things were settled,” Vaughn said.

“Maybe they are,” she said.

Vaughn was getting that hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, and it was growing with every word she said. Something was wrong and he did not know what it was, had not seen it coming. It struck him suddenly that she wasn't as comfortable or satisfied with their new arrangement as he thought she was. Maybe all the stuff with Gail had taken its toll on her, shown her things that she hadn't wanted to see, betrayed him in some way. Maybe she was ready to move on, get back to work, recalibrate her life without him. The thought filled him with foreboding. He said, “I thought we'd talked about everything.”

“Not everything,” Greta said.

Now he was sure the way this was going, and he could not think of any way to disturb the path. He said, “I'm not going back. I mean, even if she comes back. I told you.”

“I know,” she said. “It's not about Gail.”

He took a long swallow of the Grapette and the sweetness of the drink shocked him, flooded his brain with a syrupy grape sensation that made him wince. He looked at the bottle. “What's with this, anyway? It's crazy tasting.”

“I know,” Greta said. “That's why I wanted it. The bottles used to be real little. I can't believe you never had it.”

“I had grape drinks, just not this one. This one's like eighty percent sugar or something. This is blood poison.”

“It's good for you,” she said, reaching for the bottle. She took a hit off it and swished it in her mouth, then swallowed. “A lost thing,” she said.

“So, anyway, I don't know,” Vaughn said. “I thought we were kind of settled in here. I thought this was working for both of us.”

“Almost,” Greta said. “There are some things hanging out there. I need to do some work, I mean, more work.”