Panama (15 page)

I could tell she was white though it was dark, and the portholes glowed warmly. I slipped into the water and began to swim. I don't know how long it took. I was not in the best of shape and I was exhausted by the curious morning running across our island town. But I got to the boat, touching its towering bow and holding myself for a rest. Then I let the tide carry me along the hull, through the panels of yellow light, my fingertips gliding over the rough barnacles at the waterline. From somewhere above the rail, I could hear Jesse's voice; he spoke angrily of the eating habits of Americans, claiming they never knew what they wanted. I knew what I wanted.

When I got to the stern, I knew for the first time how deep Catherine's scheming against my sanity had become. Above my head, in enormous brass letters, it said: S.S. SNACK. And directly over the transom, the man I'd first thought I'd heard speaking stood. It was the old man on No Name Key whom I had discovered arranging Catherine's hair on the mud. He had the cane from my grandfather's scabbard and he worked it between his two hands as he stared down, down, at me, suspended in a warm ocean. I released my hold on the rudder and let the tide carry me into darkness.

12

I
STAYED IN BED
a very long time. I was not alone. I was very thirsty and drank glass after glass of flat Key West tap water. Thanks to Don. Don filled the glasses from a yellow plastic pitcher as he told me where I had been and what I had been doing. Then an ice cube jammed the spigot and Don, while trying to refill my glass, slopped about a half quart through the top of one of his mesh two-tones.

“That's the first thing you've done for which you should have been paid,” I said aggressively. “Now let me tell you something. I don't care what I've been doing or whether it was right or wrong because it will all come out in the wash—” Don opened his wallet and let the credit cards plummet from his hand in their accordion plastic enclosure.

“Take these. You're broke. You can ruin my credit. My signature is easy to forge. But take these and use up my money until you're satisfied I'm not in it for the money.”

“What are you in it for?”

“Memory. It's the only thing that keeps us from being murderers.”

“Well, I don't have one.”

“I want to rebuild it.”

“I don't want it back.”

“You
must
have it back.”

“Oh, no you don't.”

“What do you mean?”

“Telling me god damn you that I can't proceed without knowing where I've been. Don't pull that old malarkey on me. Where you from anyway? Penciltucky? You god damn spy. Here I am to start with, half frozen, from trying to pay a god damned visit to a very important American citizen—”

“Who's that?”

“Who's what?”

“This very important American citizen.”

“C'mon. You know who it is.”

“I want to see if you have the balls to tell me.”

“I can tell you.”

“Well, tell me.”

“Who I went to see?”

“Yeah, who.”

“Jesse James.”

“Jesse James has been dead for a century, mister. He was shot by Bob Ford whilst attempting to hang a picture.”

“Never happened.”

“I'm telling you—”

I had to shout.
“Bob Ford never got it done.”
I calmed myself. “A picture of what?” I then asked.

“What d'you mean?”

“Jesse James was hanging a picture of what?”

“A landscape. Let's say a landacape of Missouri.”

“Which would be what?” Jesse owned one picture: a photograph of his horse, Stonewall Jackson.

“Thickets.”

“Thickets.”
I thought that this was a paltry fabrication.

“You heard me.”

“Well, I say he never got shot by Bob Ford.”

“You want to get smacked? Do you know how ugly it is not to give in to someone trying to save you?”

“No.” I saw the skinny detective would hit me. He wasn't man enough for some red-blooded despair.

Jesse, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

*   *   *

I don't think I've ever mentioned my first meeting with Catherine. Do I start on this because the end is in sight? I couldn't face that; and, in fact, a certain giddy courage accompanies my ever raising the question at all. I don't think I could survive with less than the hope of a long life under American skies, with Catherine. At the same time, I know that it's been one crisis after another. But, what of it. We met in a San Francisco pet shop where I had boarded my toucan. The toucan had been mistakenly sold; and since the store smelled of monkey droppings, I accused the manager of incompetence. Catherine watched from a distance, and when our exchange became rather cruel, she began releasing animals; first the gerbils, and working her way up to the primates. She hated meanness and by the time she had averted what had every chance of becoming an ugly fight, there were a number of fanciful creatures, tropical and otherwise, running out the door to disappear among the busy feet of pedestrians. “This,” thought I to myself, “is my kind of girl.”

There were bills to be paid, after which we adjourned to a Japanese-style restaurant which served Serbo-Croatian food in addition to raw fish and a startling marshmallow salad that was absolutely gratis to anyone who came through the door and braved the wilderness of bentwood coat racks in the foyer. Even there, I was not oblivious to certain family glories of mine, the sound of horses in the underbrush—perhaps “thickets” is
not
the wrong word—gunpowder in percussion Colts, tired men in their hangouts, haunted Missouri barns.

Over the top of my salad, I could see faces pressed to the glass amid Japanese lettering.

“What do they want from you?” asked Catherine.

“I don't know. But my job is to make them think they're going to get it.”

She looked at me; you know how—long and assessing, ending with a sudden grin. I want to isolate this, the sudden smile, emerging as it does in Catherine as—what?—well, as a sunburst, from deep thought. Similarly, when after puzzling over some confusion, Catherine says no, it is as sudden and fatal as the sunburst smile. It is over. Do you see? Over.

Then we went and hung around the Richmond–San Rafael bridge. I stared ruefully at Alcatraz while Catherine wrote our names on the abutment, in a heart, with a chalky stone, scratching away and talking about the South and the poor complexions of San Francisco while I, as usual, talked about the dead and near-dead. Catherine, strong and living, had thrown herself at my feet. I couldn't shut up.

I had at that time a bodyguard who had had a distinguished career as a U.S. Marshal in Portland and Northern California. His name was Roy Jay Llewelyn and he had survived many shootouts in Federal Service. He had also sent many people to Alcatraz, and as Catherine and I played, he gazed serenely at its impregnable shape.

Roy knew many other hired guns in the area, some U.S. Marshals, and they were a little society of men who showed each other their bullet holes. Later, when Marcelline spoke of triggermen, I thought of Roy.

Roy took Catherine and me to the dump at south San Francisco. The triggermen were there, car lights trained on a hill of rubbish, shooting rats. On the hoods of their cars were supertuned Pachmayr combat pistols. The hill was ignited like a movie screen, and back in the dark, the cigarettes of gunslingers glowed over the sound of AM car radios. Now and then, a voice: “There's a damn goblin, Roy.” A rat would creep through the glare of illegal hot car lights—quartz iodide shimmer on wet fur—and Roy Jay Llewelyn would drop into position and let the goblin have it. As night sank in, hungry rats threw caution to the winds while Catherine and I crawled into the back seat of Roy's triple-tone Oldsmobile. Gently, I undressed Catherine for the first time while the younger gun hands crowded around Roy. We made love for a long while as the automatics popped and rat parts flew among the rubbish. San Francisco then had been an earlier song, a song of Alcatraz, pet stores, Japanese-Croatian restaurants, gunmen, and rat gore. Love affairs have begun more prettily; but that was the only one we got. I was a star and couldn't just walk around.

Catherine had been living for a year and a half on three Maxwell House coffee cans of inherited jewelry. She was so frugal then that there were, when I met her, still two cans left, including the one that contained her great-aunt Catherine's emerald bracelet, bought for her by her husband when he commanded a ship for the Navy in China.

I swept Catherine off her feet to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, years before rich rock-and-roll fascists took it over. At that time, it was a hotel where the staff specialized in memorizing faces just to tell you how good it was to see you again.

I was making a tremendous living demonstrating, with the aplomb of a Fuller Brush salesman, all the nightmares, all the loathsome, toppling states of mind, all the evil things that go on behind closed eyes. When I crawled out of the elephant's ass, it was widely felt I'd gone too far; and when I puked on the mayor, that was it, I was through. I went home to Key West and voted for Carter.

We set a room service record.

I would send out for little things. A single pack of Salem Longs. Trifles. We had much sex, even while on the phone; or during Ed McMahon dog-food commercials, where a spaniel would choose between two bowls. When Catherine took her chair into the bathroom to play with the taps, I knew we'd been in the hotel too long. The message light was flashing on the phone. There were huge blue grapes soaking the morning
New York Times.
I called to check out. News of what I'd done to—or, I should say,
on
—the mayor had hit the hotel. The staff stared at me. I said the mayor would soon be writing spy novels in prison like other government felons; but I had little conviction. They didn't like me and they didn't think I was funny.

At La Guardia, I wore dark glasses and ate about a pound of Oreo cookies, after which I could have really nailed the mayor, but I thought, “Why cry over spilt milk?”

Nighttime 707 Commuter to Miami: little reading lights ignited the disembodied arms in rows in front of me, arms which listlessly flipped airline magazines, or held cigarettes to stream smoke into the cones of light now and then swept aside by the air current behind a hurrying stewardess. All of us passengers were torn from our origins. Red and green lights shimmered on riveted aluminum wings and beneath us my little America, my baby madhouse, deployed towns and farms and cities against the icy ruinous transept of time and the awful thing which awaits it.

Catherine and I swallowed cocktails from the cart, though we seldom had the correct change and drew ugly glances from the stewardesses. I felt that my hands and feet were swelling up and that the pilot had falsified the cabin pressure. I felt too that having to go up and down the aisle at night, to put up with incorrect change and the flight crew's demand for snacks, was infuriating the stewardesses and that any minute an atrocity directed at the sheeplike passengers with their magazines could break out. Catherine and I were in tough shape mentally; and we had started to fear the stewardesses. As though to throw fat on the fire, they began to gather in the tail of the plane, to ignore the call buttons and to block the toilet. My stomach was full of butterflies and when I saw an old man gesture helplessly to a stewardess as she shot to the tail, I felt I had to do something for us all. I unfastened my seat belt, catching Catherine's alarmed glance, and started aft. I thought as I glided above the passengers that I saw their hopes of something better winging to me.

The stewardesses glowered toward my approach. They were in a little group. There were sandwich wrappers and styrofoam. An aluminum door was ajar behind them and toilet light flooded forth. They had more food than we did. They seemed to glance at one blonde, a Grace Kelly type with a Bic crossways in her tunic. I was afraid.

When I reached them, I said, “There's an old man who needs a glass of water. Can you help?”

The blonde stared through me. Then she reached up and touched a switch. Over three hundred passengers,
RETURN TO SEAT
appeared in lights.

“Hit it,” said the blonde.

“I wonder if I—”

“Can't you read?”

“The old man needs—”

“I don't care what he needs. We are entering turbulence. Return to your seat and extinguish all smoking materials.” Then she added something which signaled the beginning of my understanding that the end of my glory was at hand. “You rotten pervert,” she said. “Blowing your cookies all over the mayor of New York.”

*   *   *

Zut alors! I am in arrears with everyone; else why are they all explaining the sky is blue or yesterday I ate breakfast twice?
Why?
Someone said, “Two plus two equals four is a piece of insolence.” And these simpletons think I shall accept their reports at face value! Not possible; a thousand times no.

I'm not complaining. If people accept me as I am, that is, fallen from a high place, and don't assume that I am in despair and require that actuality be described to me, why then a happy liaison of spirits is always a possibility. But not if we are doing ABCs on the state of reality.

Enough of this. The marriage of my aunt, Roxanna Hunnicutt, impends. I must touch base with the orchestra.

But before I do, I would like to note that I, screw loose and fancy free, know certain things, that I am crazy like a fox. I know that Jesse robbed and killed and that he was lonely. I know he was left behind, left for dead. But I know he rose again from the dead. At the same time as these issues ring, I know that I must touch base with the orchestra.

As to this orchestra, I am an admirer; at the same time, I know better. I came of age like everyone else, wearing out copies of
Tupelo Honey,
feeling richly gloomy. Now in Los Angeles, Jackson Browne and the Eagles nurse everybody's bruises, and Mick Jagger, the tired old hag, says the Rolling Stones are the best punk band in the world. It's desperate. I prefer Jorge Cruz playing for endless Cuban weddings in Key West, the only city in America where you can buy novelty condoms in the municipal airport, and where the star of
The Dog Ate The Part We Didn't Like
can have a little peace.