Galveston (14 page)

He grunted, continued past the tub. Polly heard the toilet seat being flipped up and then the heavy cascade. “Oh, May,” she muttered.

“I have to go,” he protested. “And you won’t let me piss outside.”

“I don’t like you to pee where all the guests can see you,” she returned.

“Lester and I are going into Williamsville.”

“What for?”

“The storm’s coming.”

“Mm-hmm?”

“We need supplies.”

“We have supplies,” said Polly, filling in the word
tapir.
“Remember? I got you to buy water, gasoline, batteries, flashlights …”

“Uh-yuh.” Maywell was finally through. “There’s still a few supplies we need.”

“I see.”

“Never know with this sort of thing.”

“Too true.” Polly knew pretty well what supplies Maywell was referring to, but she decided not to press the point. It was his life, after all. She put aside the pencil and puzzle and lay back in the tub. “Just remember, there’s work to be done around here. We have to board up the windows …”

“Yes’m.”

“Secure everything, clear away potential debris.”

“Yes’m.”

She loved the way Maywell said “yes, ma’am,” deferential and insolent at the same time. “You know what?” she said. “I’m feeling a little bit frisky.”

Maywell cocked an eyebrow.

“Must be something in the air,” she said. “Doesn’t the atmosphere get all charged up before a storm?”

“Could do,” replied Maywell.

“It’s kind of exciting, isn’t it? I mean, I guess it’s scary, but at the same time, I don’t know … perhaps a little taste of mortality whets the appetite for—”

Maywell appeared by the side of the tub, pushed the tub rack down to the far end, bent over and took hold of her. He lifted her from the water, took her into the next room and set her down on the bed.

Lester waited for Maywell in the Pirate’s Lair, trying to think of useful things to do. He went behind the bar and plucked up the radio tube, the one he’d been sent to fetch from Miami. A memory came of the night he’d spent there, and Lester winced with shame. He had gone to a club where women paraded
around naked, which might be pleasant enough but was no way for a preacher-man to behave. Lester counted that as one of his main professions—he was a gardener, a psalmist and a preacher.

He wasn’t ordained, mind you, but the people of Dampier Cay didn’t mind. The islanders were actually skeptical of church-sanctioned ministers, preferring gospellers who were not constrained by orthodoxy. Lester preached with the blissed-out enthusiasm of a jazz musician, his eyes disappearing beneath the lids as he searched out heaven. His sermons, delivered out of doors, most often on the big rocks overlooking the ocean, were very popular. People were willing to forgive him his excesses, and he had a few, although nowhere near as many as when he was young. They used to think of Lester as bad news, particularly when he was in the company of the come-to-naught Maywell Hope.

Lester opened the radio cupboard and spent a few moments looking at the thing. He plugged in the new tube, flicked the toggle switch to make sure everything was working. Then he closed the cupboard doors again. That wasn’t the sort of chore he was supposed to do; clean work was Maywell’s lookout. Except that Maywell was no good with anything that used electrical power, so Lester often did little things and then made no mention of it. Maywell would find the radio in working order and allow Miss Polly and everyone else to believe that he’d done it himself. Which was fair enough, really, just one of the rewards Maywell had earned by finding his way into Miss Polly’s bed.

Sometimes Lester had to laugh, thinking how well Maywell had done with his life. He used to be the scrawny
little white boy whom no one liked, the latest in a succession of unpopular Hope men. Hope men were violent, lazy and given to strong drink. The Hope genealogy was bizarre, too. On the endpapers of Lester’s bible was his own family tree, and Lester often marvelled at all the branches. He liked to follow them and discover (it always felt like a discovery) that he was related to Sherman Vaughan, who had left the island fourteen years ago and now played the trumpet with B.B. King. Or Marcella Knight, who was the most beautiful woman on the island—although that was actually a disappointment, because Lester would have liked to have had a taste of Marcella, and there was an inviolable rule against relations with anybody whose name appeared in the fly-leaf of the family bible. The point being, Maywell’s bible—not that he or any other Hope ever owned one—would not have contained any such complicated design. The Hope lineage proceeded father to son, always just the single boy, seemingly with no woman involved. Like a jellyfish might divide into two, although it seemed to Lester like he met some fellow in a tavern who told him that wasn’t so, about jellyfish.

Maywell Hope finally appeared in the Pirate’s Lair, tugging the baseball cap down, fixing sunglasses over his eyes. He nodded at Lester and left the building. Lester hurried behind, and didn’t catch up until they were halfway down the little rise.

“Did you tell Miss Polly we were going to town?” Lester asked innocently, although he knew he was being prankish—how long does it take to tell a woman you’re going to town?—and Maywell knew it too.

Maywell let it go, this time. Sometimes he’d let things go, sometimes he’d get all righteous and start throwing punches. There was a time when Lester would have hit back, indeed there was a time when Lester could have kicked Maywell’s scrawny white butt. But all that was different, now that Maywell had found his way into Polly’s bed. Now Lester was forced to trot after Maywell like a dog. Maywell did the clean work, Lester was the one with shit all over his hands.

They climbed into the rusted minivan. Lester sat in the passenger’s seat. When there were guests being driven around, of course, Lester was expected to crawl into one of the rear seats. But now it was just the two of them, which—his complicated emotions notwithstanding—made Lester enormously happy.

Maywell cranked the key and the vehicle yowled into ignition. He threw the thing into gear (not
first
gear, Lester noticed; Maywell was a piss-poor driver) and piloted out onto the gravel road. Lester rested his arm out the window and settled back into his seat, pretending, for a few minutes, that he and Maywell were still best friends. “We got things to do in town,” he announced for no reason.

“We have plenty to do at the Edge, getting ready for the storm,” Maywell said. “So I don’t want you going into the Royal.”

“No, sir, I won’t do that.” Although Lester
would
do it, fuck Maywell Hope. He’d do whatever the hell he wanted to. He turned and looked out to sea. Far to the east, beyond the horizon, the sky was darkening.

Maywell stopped the car in front of Millroy’s General Store. Lester threw open his door and scampered away, making a
beeline for the New Royal Tavern. “Be back in half an hour!” Maywell called after him.

“Yes, sir!” Lester returned, although it was all a show. For whose benefit, Maywell couldn’t say, but it was all a show, both his own bossiness and Lester’s servility. He understood Lester’s bitterness; Lester resented the fact that Maywell shared Polly’s bed and was accorded certain privileges and other favours. What Lester didn’t appreciate was the fact that Maywell loved Polly. Mind you, Lester didn’t exactly
know
that, because it was Maywell’s great secret. He kept his love secret because he suspected it was imperfect. What else could one expect from the Last of the Merry Boys?

Upton Belshaw stopped Maywell, pressing a hand against his chest, outside Millroy’s. Upton removed his hat and nodded a few times before speaking. “They’re making this storm out to be fierce,” he finally said.

Maywell nodded. “There’s going to be some wind and rain, Upton. Make sure your windows are boarded.”

“Now there’s the thing, Maywell. The front window broke and I haven’t replaced it. Should I put board up anyway?”

“I would, Upton.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t worry. There’ll be a big blow and then there won’t.”

“I’m a little concerned that my house … I don’t believe my house is up to it. I have young children, Maywell.”

“I know that, Upton.”

“I was wondering if we could come over to the Water’s Edge.”

Maywell pictured the Water’s Edge, the main building
sitting atop the little rise. “If I were you, Upton, I’d take my family to the big hotel.”

Then he walked into the store. The shelves were almost empty. They were never overstocked at the best of times, but now there were but a couple of boxes of cereal, a few tin cans, and that was that. Maywell went to the counter. June gazed at him steadily, and Maywell detected a slight hint of fear in the whites of her eyes.

“Carton of Sweet Caps,” he said, pulling bills out of his pocket, smoothing them out in his hands.

June shook her head, very slightly. “No cartons left.”

“I’ll take whatever packs you got.”

“We’re out of Sweet Caporals,” June almost whispered.

“Rothmans, then.”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“Winstons. Silk Cut. Senior Service.”

“We don’t have any cigarettes, Maywell.”

Maywell made a careful inspection, turning his head slowly as though scanning the flats for bonefish. He saw lottery tickets, a few video cassettes, some empty pop bottles that had been returned for the deposit. “None?”

“People have been stocking up. We were supposed to get some more today, but the flight was cancelled.”

“June, you knew I’d need smokes.”

“Maywell, you told me you were going to quit. You said that was the last carton you were ever going to buy.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, June, I say that every goddam time, don’t
I?”

“I’m sorry, Maywell.”

“You’re absolutely sure that there’s none, not a solitary pack, in the store? Don’t you want to check the back room or anything?”

“Maywell … we are out of cigarettes.”

Maywell entered the New Royal Tavern, which was pretty grandly named considering that the bar proper was banged together out of plywood and the appurtenances amounted to two posters, both years out of date, team photographs of the Tottenham Hotspurs. There were a few stools scattered about, two of them currently occupied. Johnny Reyes was sitting in a corner, and Lester had claimed a seat beside the bar so that he could rest an elbow there and balance his head on his folded knuckles. When Maywell entered the establishment, Lester downed his shot of rum and then tapped the countertop for another. Kirby moved slowly behind the bar, drawing up a big bottle of Captain Morgan’s from down below, filling a shot glass and overturning this into Lester’s empty tumbler. Then Kirby filled the shot glass again and pushed the thing toward Maywell.

“You know I won’t drink that,” said Maywell.

“I just thought,” returned Kirby, “that you’d be sick of white milk by now.”

Lester laughed, too loudly. “Kirby got you good, Maywell.
Sick of white milk.
You should kick his ass.”

Maywell understood that he had been the topic of conversation in the bar for the past little while. He looked over at Johnny Reyes, who was nodding slowly, staring down at his own feet. “Sick of white milk,” Johnny repeated. “Maywell ought to be sick of white milk.”

“Milk’s good for you,” noted Maywell. “You need milk to grow. Come along, Lester.”

“I believe I’ll just have another drink.”

“We have work to do.”

“That woman got you doing
work
?” demanded Kirby. “Fuck, May. She must have one goddam glory hole.”

“That’ll be enough of that, Kirby. Don’t you have business to attend to? Seems to me there’s a storm headed our way.”

Johnny Reyes looked up from the close inspection of his feet, the rubber flip-flops and burnished calluses. “Hey, Maywell,” he muttered, so quietly that the words barely made it to Hope’s ears, “are you thinking of sticking around for this one?”

Maywell Hope had been off Dampier Cay only twice in his lifetime. He knew that many people would account that as odd. His knowledge of the world was therefore limited, informed largely by television-watching, although he did that only rarely. There were nights, as Maywell tended bar in the Pirate’s Lair, that the guests had no questions for him, nights when everyone just sipped cocktails in a relatively civilized and subdued manner, and Maywell, growing bored, would turn on the television set. He would watch CNN and listen to tales of chaos. He had seldom heard of the countries the reporters talked about. He had grown up in Williamsville, and it had only been twenty-odd years since some representative of the British government had stopped by to establish mandatory education. Before that, schooling was more or less optional—and not even a viable option for Maywell, burdened as he was by the Hope family name.

Maywell’s concept of the globe was based in large part on his reading, and rereading, of William Dampier’s
A New Voyage Round the World.
So in Maywell’s mind there was the
Atlantick Sea
, and Dampier Cay was in the
Caribee.
He thought of the largest island to the southwest as
Hispaniola
, although he was grudgingly aware that it had at some time been divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Hope knew his unique reference points made him an object of curiosity. His fishing clients often grilled him about the immediate geography; Maywell might refer to
New Andalusia
, which would earn him a look of confusion, then as much laughter as the clients thought they could get away with.

What the clients didn’t know about were the wondrous things that were included in Maywell’s world view from reading
A New Voyage Round the World.
Penguin-Fruit, for instance, which
are wholsome, and never offend the Stomach; but those that eat many, will find a heat or tickling in their Fundament.
That book was filled with such goings-on as would make the CNN reporters tremble and quake:
Therefore Captain Swan immediately march’d out of the Town, and his Men all followed him; and when he came to the place where the Engagement had been, he saw all his Men that went out in the Morning lying dead. They were stript, and so cut and mangled, that he scarce knew one Man.