City of Boys (27 page)

Louis wanted to sell the house, and when Florence talked about moving to Florida to live in it, he turned his face toward the flat fields and said nothing, but only a few months later they were leaving Indiana to drive south to their new home. When Florence waved to her parents from the window of the car, she could hardly distinguish them from the background; the whole scene looked as stiff and flat as cardboard: the house, the car parked in the driveway, the dog, and behind them a cardboard sun pasted to a cardboard sky. It was the last she saw of Indiana, and it wasn’t until they reached Georgia that she realized she would soon be in a place where Louis would be the only person she knew. The thought made her long for something familiar, but as they
got closer to Florida, it all became stranger, the familiar dirt and grass of home giving way to a world of alligators, palm trees, huge flapping birds. She could tell Louis was apprehensive, too. He talked the whole drive down of Buzz, his best friend in Indiana.

—Oh, he said whenever they saw anything strange, —Buzz would love that. Every time he said “Buzz,” he looked in the rearview mirror, as if he expected Buzz to be following them down the highway in his little blue car.

—Jesus, Louis said the first time they saw a dead alligator by the side of the road. —Buzz would get a kick out of that. He shook his head. —Boy, he said. —I wish Buzz was here. He caught himself and glanced quickly at Florence, but she herself almost wished Buzz was there, too, to take up some of the expanding space between them. She looked away from Louis and wondered what could possess an alligator to try to cross a busy highway; even to a prehistoric brain, the odds must have been obvious, but the farther south they traveled, the more alligators they passed, tangled up in big heaps by the side of the road.

According to what she has read and heard on the radio, there are simply too many alligators to be contained in the rapidly shrinking jungles here, and almost weekly there seems to be another story about an alligator dragging itself up into a yard to snatch a dog or a cat, then sinking back down into a swamp somewhere. Florence can imagine the noise in its brain as it lurches out into the bright sunny glare, surrounded by rushing cars: they make such huge confused targets, she thinks, it’s no wonder they’re hit so often. Their bodies are everywhere, turning yellow in the sun, the enormous heads turned away from the traffic.

This is not the Florida that Florence imagined, not what she feels she has somehow been promised by television and magazines and posters in the windows of travel agencies.
She expected a bright world of flowers and light and pure white sand, but the sun here is so close and hot and bright that it fades everything beneath it; and though flowers grow all over, springing up almost out of nothing, they are strange impossible colors, with unpleasant rotting scents. And the sand–the sand is as white and fine as powder, but it is everywhere, in everything, creeping under her sheets, into the hot creases of her skin, between her teeth when she eats, and when she tries to sleep at night, she can feel it, a grainy sifting in her lungs.

These are all things, she thinks, to which she could, in time, become accustomed, perhaps even to like, but what she can’t imagine ever getting used to is the constant, unnerving motion here, the life that springs up wherever she turns: spongy brown spiders creeping across the bathroom walls, tiny gray lizards zipping across the porch screen, big flying bugs that Mrs. Walker calls “palmettos” but that look to Florence like nothing more than giant cockroaches. The ground is covered with reptiles and the sky is full of bugs and birds-screeching gulls; clumsy pelicans as big as dogs; stiff, fragile egrets and flamingos. One of the hotels across the street keeps a few bright pink flamingos penned up in front, and all day long they stalk around, stabbing into the grass, chasing after some doomed skittering life. The surface of the ground itself seems alive, and once or twice Florence has found herself staring at some lump of vegetation that suddenly stirred to reveal itself as the slick clotted skin of a frog or a lizard. It is completely different from Indiana, where the people and the animals seemed waxy and inert, where even the leaves of the trees seemed somehow locked into place. Here she finds herself more and more having to shake herself awake, sunk in a haze of physical sensation, aware of nothing more than the baking heat, a sudden flap of wings, the smell of things kept too long in the
wet air–flowers and wood and skin rotting. She feels surrounded by this world, and she and Louis, stuck in the middle of it all, deprived of the common details of lives lived together in the same place, seem to have run out of things to say to each other. When he comes home from work, his shirt is stuck to his skin and his hair lies in thin strips across his head. Each day he comes in and sits directly in front of the air conditioner, leaning his head all the way back, his mouth open to the ceiling, as the cool air beats against his neck. It’s the only way he can ever breathe down here, he tells Florence, but he looks so uncomfortable she wants to bend his head off and set it gently back upright on his neck. After he is cool, he turns on the television, which is always on when he is home. He watches sports, any sport, and Florence can tell that as he watches he is wondering what Buzz would say of this play, or that catch, and no matter what Louis is ever doing or saying, she can see that his mind is still moving across the bumpy Indiana plain a thousand miles away. They seldom talk about Indiana, but when it comes up, he speaks of things she does not remember: the changing smell of the air with the shifting of seasons, clear summer evenings full of bright stars. All she can remember of Indiana is the flat, dry dirt, the stiff sting of weeds against her ankles, and when she talks to her mother on the phone, she is sure she can hear, in their big silent pauses, the noise of machinery churning heavily somewhere in the distance. Whenever she talks to her mother, Florence tells her that she and Louis are both fine, they like it down here, everything is just as they’d hoped; it is clear to Florence, however, that they are both changing, especially Louis. In their first few weeks here, he took Polaroid pictures of everything–the house, the ocean, the pelicans and flamingos–and sent them back to Indiana. Even then, when she looked at herself in the pictures, she looked odd, bleached out–she
could hardly tell the difference between her dress and her skin in the bright light. When Louis grew bored with the camera, Florence finished out the film he’d bought, taking a picture of him every few days. She lined them all up along the keys of the small piano, which Louis’s aunt too had used to display photographs–the top was kept down, and covered with family pictures, many of Louis, taken from grade school right up through the year or so before she died. When Florence compares the pictures she has taken of Louis–one from the lower end of the keyboard, taken in their first few weeks here, with a more recent photo–she is shocked to see the changes in him. He looks tired and washed-out, but mostly he has grown alarmingly thin. Little pockets of shadows have appeared in his cheeks and eye sockets, and his legs poking out from his shorts look sticky and useless. Cancer, she thought immediately; she had heard of such things happening after sudden changes, but even while she let her mind wander over the possibilities of such a future–chemotherapy, radiation, hospitals, doctors–she knew he was growing thin simply because he ate less and less, lately refusing even foods she was sure he liked. It started with pork chops, she can’t remember now how long ago–weeks, months? She put his plate in front of him, and he glanced at the pork chop on it, looked out the window a moment, then back at his plate.

—I don’t really like pork chops, he said, and she stopped chewing to consider how many times she’d served him pork chops, and if he’d eaten them. She was sure he had.

—No, he said. —I’ve always hated pork chops. I hate the color. And the consistency. And the way they taste. He paused, then added, —I always have.

And like this, more and more foods have been eliminated from their diet: peas, rye bread, Swiss cheese. At every meal, Florence waits, a little hum of tension in her stomach,
to see if he will eat. She feels guilty if she likes what she has prepared, and as she watches him segregate the food on his plate into neat little untouchable piles, her own food turns bitter in her mouth as she chews. At such moments, she considers how time is passing for her, how her life is unfolding, and a thin wire of panic runs through her.

—Oh, her mother always said to her when she was growing up, —you’ll be a late bloomer. But now that she has left her parents and come to Florida, no life has sprung up yet to bloom around her. Every day she moves cautiously around furniture she does not like, eats from dishes it would never occur to her to buy, and sleeps in a bed in which, she is sure, Louis’s aunt died. In their first few weeks here, she was sure that Louis was biding his time, waiting for her to change her mind, to tell him it was all a mistake and they could move back to Indiana, but now Indiana seems impossibly far away, and every day while she waits for something to happen, someone to talk to, something to change her, she covers her face and arms and goes outside to sit under the hot bright sun and listen to the catalogue of misery that is Mrs. Walker’s life.

Mrs. Walker leans forward and rubs her hands along the wooden arms of her chair. —I’m not going to let them bury me in some cheap coffin, she says. —God won’t let them. He can’t. She looks at Florence narrowly. —Your aunt died, she says. —But I’m not going to.

—It was Louis’s aunt, Florence says. —She had a heart attack.

—Jesus Christ, Mrs. Walker says. —You’d think they could wait a couple of years. How could God do this to me? That cheap coffin. They’ll try to bury me in some swamp somewhere, you wait.

Florence watches the little groups of tourists wander by on
the street, and reaches down to run her hands through the warm gravel. She scatters a handful over her feet, and Mrs. Walker shakes her head.

—If you’d rake that, she says, —it would be a lot neater.

—How could they bury you in a swamp? Florence asks. —Isn’t that illegal?

—Oh, I suppose they’d find a way, Mrs. Walker says. —Or they’ll try to cremate me. That’s what I did with Richard. It’s what he wanted, she adds quickly, as though Florence has accused her of something. She closes her eyes. —They made me take the ashes back with me.

She opens her eyes and looks at Florence. —What do you do with a bunch of ashes? People around here, they want to be tossed in the ocean, but he hated the ocean. She shakes her head. —I just dumped them out here. This house was the only thing he loved.

Florence drops the gravel she’s holding. —I didn’t know that, she says.

—Well, says Mrs. Walker. —Now you do.

Florence looks around at Mrs. Walker’s neat gravel lawn; she wonders if any of Mr. Walker’s ashes were scattered onto her own gravel, and she wonders what Mrs. Walker thinks will happen to Mr. Walker at the Rapture—if he will somehow reassemble into human form, or if he will just appear as a clump of gravel, or a puffy haze of smoke. Before she can figure out a polite way to ask about this, Mrs. Walker laughs.

—That bastard, she says. —He’s where he belongs.

She turns her head. —Look, she says and Florence looks around to see Louis pull into their driveway. Someone is in the car with him, and as Louis gets out and bends down to talk to the passenger, Florence can see that it is a girl. Louis doesn’t notice Florence or Mrs. Walker in the yard, and as he walks to the house, the girl in the car watches him; when
she moves her head, something around her neck gleams gold, but the rest of her is in shadow.

—Who’s that? Mrs. Walker asks, looking at the car.

—Louis, Florence says. —He’s home a little early.

—I mean in the car. There’s a girl in the car.

Through the windows Florence watches Louis’s progress through the house. He stops in the kitchen, his mouth opening and closing as he looks around. She can see the spreading wet blots under the arms of his shirt, and she wonders if any of her neighbors ever look in and notice such things about her—that her hair is messy, or that she is still wearing her bathrobe past noon some days.

—I guess I’d better go in now, she says, and Mrs. Walker looks past her to the girl in the car. Gravel crackles under her chair as she rocks, sending up a fine white dust that Florence can feel settle in her lungs.

—Oh, Louis says when Florence comes into the kitchen. —I was looking for you.

He smiles uncertainly and Florence can see that he doesn’t know exactly how to broach the subject of the girl in the car; he looks all around the room, then back at Florence. The skin of his face seems darker than it was this morning, and a thin band of white runs around the edge of his hairline.

—Did you call the guy? he finally asks. —About the air conditioner?

She had forgotten until now that he asked her to do this. The memory of their conversation surfaces and she thinks vaguely that it had something to do with a shark.

—He couldn’t come, she says. —Maybe tomorrow.

—Oh, Louis says. He looks around again, nodding, as if he is taking stock of the room. Florence wonders if, for a moment, he is considering saying nothing at all about the girl in the car; perhaps he hopes she will grow tired of waiting and wander away. The sun has left white circles around his
eyes, and at the center of each is a little burst of blue, blossoming like a flower. He sighs unhappily.

—Because, he says. —Because there’s this girl. In the car. He stops and looks out the window at Mrs. Walker, who is still peering in the direction of the driveway. —A hitchhiker. She was hitchhiking.

He takes a breath and Florence notices that his pants are stained at the knee. It is possible, she thinks, that she has washed this pair of pants a dozen times without seeing that stain.

—I figured, Louis goes on, —that something could happen to her. You know. She’s just a kid. She’s in the car, he says again, but behind him the door opens and the girl pokes her head in.

—Hi, she says. —I was getting hot.