Galveston (11 page)

She stepped into the room and pulled the towel away, pushing Larry back toward the bed. Larry figured this was his reward for saving her life, but he had it ass backwards. Larry had screwed things up, and Beverly was giving him a shot at some kind of redemption.

Their sex was passionate, at least at the beginning, Beverly and Larry the Wit clawing at each other, covering each other with fierce kisses. When he was inside her, Beverly asked if he knew about Galveston.

Larry was moving his hips with a certain rhythm, but it was no rhythm that meant anything to Beverly, as it communicated neither need nor pleasure.

“Do you know about Galveston?” she repeated, because Larry had made no response.

“I want to fuck you,” he answered.

Beverly dug her fingers into his butt, which provoked a stuttering spasm that felt good to her for a moment, but she had clawed his ass with a certain anger. After all, she reflected, he
was
fucking her. What Larry the Wit meant was,
I’d like to fuck you without interruption or distraction.

Beverly’s adventure with the Tornado Hunter hadn’t
completed any journey. When she whispered once again, “Do you know about Galveston?” all Larry did was grunt. She began to weep.

“Yes, I do,” answered Caldwell, sitting up on his little cot, turning toward the voice and finding a wall. “I know all about it.” Sometimes images, imaginings, thoughts of Galveston, came to him with the force of memory—or what he remembered memory felt like.

He stood up then, stared into the darkness and waited for his eyes to adjust. He went into the washroom to urinate and was surprised to find that his penis was stiff, at least stiffer than usual. He had no erection—hadn’t had one for a long, long time—but his penis was stiff enough that Caldwell wondered what stuff had been in his dreams. He took hold of his penis experimentally and pulled at it. There was actually a little stirring, the distant murmur of physical pleasure.

“I know all about Galveston,” Caldwell whispered.

Once (Caldwell wasn’t sure how long ago this was, perhaps it was even recently) he had summoned a call girl to his hotel room. The dispatcher had asked him a number of questions, trying to determine his predilections.

“Blonde or brunette?” asked the dispatcher.

“It doesn’t really matter. Blonde,” he decided, afraid that a girl with darker hair might favour Jaime.

“Right. Do you like full-bodied girls?” The dispatcher’s voice had been ruined by cigarettes and her sentences were punctuated by greedy inhalations.

“I don’t care. Just a girl. But she has to hurry.”

“Oh, well, dear, it may be a little while. There’s a big storm on the way.”

“She has to hurry,” Caldwell repeated. “She has to get here before the storm hits.”

The dispatcher interpreted this as concern on Caldwell’s part. “Well, all right.” There was a long silence then; Caldwell imagined that the woman was consulting a clipboard or something. “Listen, sweetie, I can get Hester there in about twenty minutes, but I’ve got to tell you, she is dark-haired. And she’s not to everybody’s taste.”

“Send Hester.” Caldwell had pulled back the curtain and was staring at the sky. If he’d been asked, at that moment, where he was, he would have had only the weakest notion—the earth was flat and seemingly endless, he was in either the Canadian or American prairie—but he knew the sky intimately, he’d been watching the sky all afternoon. He had watched the clouds form, towering to the troposphere and then flattening out to form huge anvils. He had watched them darken, he’d watched them turn black. Now they shone with an eerie green tinge. There wasn’t much time. Send this girl, this Hester.

But the weather arrived before the girl did. Caldwell saw it march down the main street of the town, catching pedestrians unawares. Hats were snapped off of heads, bags ripped out of hands. People rushed into doorways, they huddled under awnings. The storm gleefully went in after them, tearing away green canvas and pelting people with hailstones the size of golf balls.

Caldwell watched one woman who refused to take cover. She leant into the wind and made slow, halting headway. The wind sucked the dress almost off her body. There was not much to this dress, and what there was, was soaking wet. Caldwell could see the shape of her breasts, the dark nipples. He could see that she was wearing tiny panties. Caldwell realized this was Hester, because she’d trained her eyes on the hotel and wouldn’t tear them away.

The storm pushed her over, knocking her to the sidewalk. She managed to get up on one knee and then she waited for a hole in the howling. When it came, she sprang up and ran. She disappeared from Caldwell’s sight and then, perhaps five minutes later, there came a weak knocking at the hotel-room door.

When he opened it, the woman reeled in, giddy and befuddled. “Holy shit,” she declared. “That’s a fucker. That is a storm of Biblical proportions.”

Caldwell saw why the dispatcher had said Hester was “not to everybody’s taste.” Her features were oddly assorted; her nose was too big, her eyes were too small, and her mouth was twisted by a scar that slashed across both lips. This scar made many of Hester’s words sound strange, causing the “s” to whistle and the “f” to come with too much air.

Caldwell went to the little mini-bar, opened it up and offered this woman a drink.

“Oh, sure, yeah, whatever,” she said, staring down at herself, trying to determine the damage done. Her knee was bloody, her dress soaked and her dark hair glued all over her back and shoulders. “Listen, bud, I’m a bit of a fucking mess
here.” She went to the washroom to get cleaned up and she didn’t close the door behind her. “My father,” she called out above the sound of a blow-dryer, “is a religious freak. A deeply religious freak. And according to him, storms are God’s way of showing He’s pissed. Like God is pissed. You know. Demonstrating His wrath. And walking over here, I’m thinking, hey, maybe, like, what am I, I’m a whore, so there’s this big storm because God’s ticked. But if He’s mad at me, why is He taking it out on everybody else?”

“Ah,” said Caldwell. “Good question.” He sat on the bed, looking into a mirror that showed him the interior of the bathroom. Hester had a towel wrapped around her waist, her arms raised and her hands in motion, one wielding the dryer, one pulling at her hair. “In the Middle Ages,” Caldwell said, “people thought that lightning was a sign that God was angry.”

“Right. Only makes sense.”

“So the whole deal was to try to appease God. Every church had a bell tower, you know, and they would send someone up to ring the bell. To try to make God happy. Of course, that was the worst place to be during a thunderstorm. Those bell-ringers would get killed all the time. But they kept doing it. For centuries.” Caldwell often felt that he had been a bell-ringer in some other life, maybe even in this one.

Hester came to stand in front of Caldwell and let the towel drop to the ground. “Anything in particular you like, bud?”

When he said nothing, she took his hand and moved it first across her breasts, then over her belly, and finally put it between her soft thighs and held it there.

Caldwell looked out the window. The storm had gone, leaving behind only grey skies and a dull, steady rain. There was no energy left.

“Bud? You with me here?”

The rain had made everything indistinct. The buildings melted into the street, the street melted into the ground.

Hester sat down beside Caldwell and reached over and touched his penis through his trousers. “Come on, bud,” she whispered, “let’s get with the program.” She unzipped him, snaked her hand through, caressed his cock softly. “Um …” Hester hesitated, then asked a question gently. “Do we have some sort of problem with the hydraulics here?”

“I’m sorry,” Caldwell managed.

“Oh, hey, don’t worry about it. Do you want me to try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”

“I don’t think that would work,” said Caldwell.

“There’s drugs, you know, that you can take …”

“I know.”

“Well, it’s your call, buddy. You placed the order, you got to pay. Tell me what you want and we’ll get to it.”

“Can I tell you a story?”

“Hot damn,” said Hester. “You hear about these freaks—no offence—who just want to talk, but I never got one before. So hell yes, bud, tell me a story.”

Caldwell licked his lips and wondered where to begin. “One morning I got up,” he said. “It was Saturday, and I had the house to myself, so I spread the paper out all over the kitchen table.”

When he tells the story to Hester, Caldwell avoids speaking of the hour he spent waiting for Darla Featherstone. His wife and son had left the house to collect his mother and would meet him at the lottery office, where an oversized cheque would be issued and photographs taken. Caldwell went upstairs to the bedroom and threw himself down on the mattress, practising for the life of leisure that was to be his. He stretched out, rubbed his stomach contentedly, and noticed, almost by accident, that he had an erection and wondered idly what, if anything, he should do about it. Darla Featherstone had said that it might be a little while before she arrived, so Caldwell supposed he had at least five or ten minutes to spare. He reminded himself that he and Jaime would probably be making love later that evening (Jaime’s favoured response to good news), but he was on the fence as to whether or not masturbation would help or hinder his evening’s performance. Mind you, toying with his cock had kind of exacerbated the situation; he was now possessed of what Jaime called, with affection, a “snarler.”

So he began to pull on it, and in his mind’s eye he saw (not that he’d summoned her, more that she’d walked in of her own accord) Darla Featherstone. She was dancing as though she were a girl at Mystery’s. She wore a sequined two-piece bikini, but she pulled it off almost immediately. In Caldwell’s mind, Darla Featherstone turned around to do this. Her buttocks were flawless, and then, as she unhooked the top, she turned back and Caldwell could see her breasts, which, since there is no gravity in dreams, pointed heavenward.

Caldwell rushed to shove his wife Jaime onto that imaginary stage, because he felt guilty about whacking off to the
phantom of Darla Featherstone, guilty that he’d dreamt Darla’s body with the naive enthusiasm of his hormone-riddled students. He knew that her body could never be so perfect; in real life Darla would be pocked and puckered like everyone else. Jaime seemed to be making this point; she stood beside Darla and gave her a series of withering glances. Jaime’s body was claimed by earthly forces. What had been nothing but muscle when she was twenty-one and provincial intercollegiate individual medley champ was now partly tallow. Still, he loved his wife’s body. Caldwell did, and he pulled on his cock with all the enthusiasm he could muster. But when Caldwell came, Darla Featherstone was the only woman he saw.

He opened his eyes. He could see the world outside through the bedroom window. Ice pellets crackled against the glass, which was framed with rime.
That probably explains
, he thought,
what’s keeping the people from the television station …

There came a knock on the door and Caldwell threw himself off the bed, and was startled to find none of the things he expected—no nightstands, no brightly burnished bureau adorned with the three hockey trophies that Jaime grudgingly, laughingly, allowed him to keep in their bedroom. Instead, Caldwell saw two beds and an old washbasin, dimly lit by a weakly cracking dawn. Outside the sliding glass door stood Beverly, her arms wrapped around herself as protection against the night’s chill. Caldwell slid the door open hesitantly.

“Hey,” said Beverly, “did we come here to fish or to fool around?”

M
AYWELL
’
S BOAT
was long and white, with a platform erected over the large outboard motor. There was no place for them to sit except beside Maywell on a small bench behind the steering console. The rest of the boat was taken up by fishing rods, rope and a long, thick pole carved at the top into a nasty point.

They travelled fast and they travelled far, that’s how it seemed to Beverly. When she fished with her grandfather, the journey to the fishing spot was always undertaken at a much slower pace. Granddad would stop at the marina to gas up, then disappear into the building and leave Beverly sitting in the boat while a teenaged boy filled up the orange tank. Her grandfather would emerge perhaps half an hour later, a little
wobbly on his legs, filled with optimism concerning the day’s catch. He had almost always forgotten to purchase worms, which was his avowed purpose in entering the marina proper. He would light a cigarette and send Beverly back in.