Second Skin (11 page)

And glancing to the left, to the right, leaning down as close as I could to Cassandra, and fighting all the while against the current and trying to draw away from Jomo’s friends in the corner—but there was no escaping the shadows, the arrogant glow of the cigar—and trying to subdue the electrical field of green taffeta and worrying, apologizing for my graceless steps, “It’s a tough crowd, Cassandra,” I said, “I don’t like the looks of it.”

She was stiff, her back was stiff, her arm was suddenly un-supple, she was making it hard for me. And I wanted to see her face—how could she, why did she turn away from me?—and wanted to feel the taffeta yielding, wanted some sign of her happiness. “You aren’t having fun, Cassandra?” I said, and squeezed her hand, wondered whether I might not be able to imitate the sons of the sea and whirl her around by that little tapering white hand for our amusement, hers and mine, and whirl her so that her skirts would rise. But there was only the varnished floor, only the stiff shadows of ropes and acrobatic rings looping down from the darkness overhead, only the steam pipes along the walls with their enormous plaster casts like broken legs, and it was discouraging and I wanted to take her to the cloakroom and take her home. “Refreshments, Cassandra? How about some chocolate cake?” And seeing a movement in the vicinity of the indolent marine and talking closer to her ear, more quickly, “Or Coke, Cassandra? Join me in a little toast to Sonny?”

But one of his admirers had taken the marine’s peaked cap, had hung it on the side of his head and was sauntering in our direction, swaggering. The cap was flopping against his neck, the pubic hair was curling around his ears, he was whistling— despite the clarion cornet and choking accordion—and he was advancing toward us casually, deliberately, shuffling our way from the darkness of giggling drinkers and lolling marine. Then a punch on my arm, jab in my ribs, and a boy’s brogan landed
in a short swift kick just above my ankle and Bub was saying, “Come on, Sister, let’s dance,” and threw his arms around her and hopped from side to side, snorting and snuffling happily into the green. Proud of his rhythm. Proud of the hat. Bub acting on orders. Bub determined to work his hands under the green bow. And Cassandra? Cassandra’s eyes were closed and she was resting her palms lightly on the heavy wooden humps of his boyish shoulders. As I started away I saw them converging on her—Jomo, Red—saw the menacing horizontal thrust of the baseball cap, the bright arc of the swinging hook, the enormous black figure of Captain Red with his tie pulled loose. They began cutting in on each other, spitting on their hands or giving her up without a word, standing by and serving as outriders for each other, and at once I understood that they were taking turns with her and that this then was their plan, their dark design.

“Me?” I said. “Someone wants me? Outside?”

She grinned, a tiny girl, messenger with bobbed hair, and said she would show me the way. Mystery. Trap set by the marine? Cruel joke? But I decided that Miranda must be having asthma out in the snow and that my little girl guide—spit curls, washed and fed, eyes like a little mother cat, and plump, liberal with her own lipstick, well-mannered and ready for the juice of life —must surely be the daughter of the frenzied sexton who was so dead set on hanging himself from the bell ropes of the Lutheran church. So I followed her.

“Like the dance?”

“Why, yes,” I said, startled, trying to keep up with her, to keep in close behind her, “yes, I do. It gives me an idea of what my own high school reunion might be like,” and I was using the back of my hand, then my handkerchief, trying to catch the scent of her.

“I bet you were popular,” she said. She was not giggling, spoke with no discernible mockery in her voice, this child of chewing gum kisses and plump young body sweetly dusted with baby talc, “I bet you’d have fun with the kids in your school or with your classmates even after thirty or forty years
or whatever it is. You don’t look like a kill-joy to me.” And leading me into a cold dark corridor, concrete, bare lead, whistling with the cold wind of my own distant past: “You know what?” speaking clearly, matter-of-factly, while I joined her hastily at the dead weight of a metal fire door and the snow began driving suddenly through a narrow crack and into our faces, “I bet all the girls go for you. Am I right? Aren’t you the type all the girls go after?”

“Well, Bubbles,” I said, and like Carmen’s her black hair was curled into little flat black points, “you’re the second person to mention this idea tonight. So perhaps there’s something in what you say.”

“I knew it,” she said, and we were pushing together, forcing the wrinkling door to yield, small plump girl and tall fat man straining together, beating back the snow, smelling the cold black night of the silent parking lot and breathing together, testing the snow together, “I knew you were the shy unscrupulous type. The type of man who might get a girl in trouble. A real lover.”

“No, no, Bubbles, not in trouble. …” But I was shivering, smiling, setting straight the core of my boundless heart. A real lover. I believed her, and I lifted my broad white face into the wet tingling island snow. We had been able to open the door about a foot and so stood together hand in hand just outside the building. Together, the two of us. Blood under the skin and alone with Bubbles, scot free again.

A pale lemon-colored light from the gymnasium windows lay in three wavering rectangles on the snow. Pale institutional light coming down from the high school wall. And beyond the cold wall, beyond the tenuous light stretched the parking lot with its furry white humps of buried automobiles and, at the far edge, the black trees tangled like barbed wire. Behind the trees was the cemetery, and I could just make out the crumbling white shapes of the tombstones, the markers of dead children, the little white obelisks in the island snow. It was the place of rendezvous for the senior class, of passion amongst the fungus and the marble vines, of fingernail polish on the lips of the
cherubim. So I felt that Bubbles and I were alone in some cheap version of limbo, and I chuckled, warmed the fingers of my free hand, and loved the trees, the perfect star-flashes of the snow, the nearness of the little cold cemetery, the buried cars, and at my side the small wet girl. But where, I wondered, was the heavy wolfish shadow of Miranda? Where the shadow of the woman who should have been clutching her chest and wheezing out there in the middle of that field of enchanted snow?

“I don’t see anyone,” I said. “Are you sure you’ve got the right person?”

“You’re supposed to meet her in the cemetery. Lucky you.”

I nodded. “But it looks so far.”

“Don’t be silly,” smiling up at me, shining her curls and eyes and earrings up at me through the snow, “it isn’t far. So good-by for now.”

“All right then,” I said. I dropped her hand, licked my chapped lips, tried and failed to imitate the bright promise of her young voice. “Good-by for now.”

Then I put down my head and started across the lot—six feet and two hundred pounds of expectant and fearless snowshoe rabbit—and wondered how many couples there were in the cars and whether or not I would dare to ask Bubbles for a kiss. I wondered too what Miranda could possibly be doing in the cemetery. And at that moment I had a vision of Miranda leaning against a lichen-covered monument in her old moth-eaten fur coat and signaling me with Jomo’s flashlight, and I hurried, took large determined strides through the trackless snow.

But I stopped. Listened. Because the air seemed to be filled with low-flying invisible birds. Large or small I could not tell, but fast, fast and out of their senses, skimming past me from every direction on terrified steel wings and silent except for the unaccountable sharp noise of the flight itself. One dove into the snow at my feet—nothing but a sudden hole in the snow— and I stepped back from it, raised my hands against the unpredictable approach, the irregular sound of motion, the blind but somehow deliberate line of attack. Escaped homing pigeons? A covey of tiny ducks driven berserk in the cold? Eaglets? I
found myself beating the air, attempting to shield my eyes and ears, thought I saw a little drop of blood on the snow. And I was relieved with the first hit. It caught me just behind the earcrunching shock at the base of the head—and still it might have been the ice-encrusted body of a small bird, except that despite the pain, the vigorous crack of the thing and my loss of breath, and even while I reached behind my ear and discovered my fingers covered with ice and blood, I was turning around, stooping, trying and of course failing to find the body. With the second hit—quite furious, close on the first, snowball full in the face—my relief was complete and I knew that this time at least I had nothing to fear from any unnatural vengefulness of wild birds.

Tremlow, I thought, when the hard-packed snowball of the second hit burst in my face, Tremlow, thinking that only Tremlow’s malice—it was black and putty-thick, a curd incomprehensibly coughed up just for me—could account for the singular intensity of this treachery intended to befall me in the parking lot, could account for the raging meanness behind this ambush. I stood my ground, spitting snow, shaking the snow out of my eyes, dragging the snow away with my two hands and feeling the sudden purple abrasions on my cheeks, trying to dodge. Not a shadow, not a curved arm, not a single one of them in sight. But the barrage was slowing, though losing none of its power, none of its accuracy, and I could see the snowballs now and they were winging at me from all angles, every direction. I swung at them, growled at them, helpless and wet and bleeding, and still they came. The third hit—blow in the side, sound of a thump, no breath—sailed up at me slowly, slowly, loomed like a white cabbage and struck me exactly as I tried to step out of its path. Tracer bullet confusion of snowballs. Malevolent missiles. From every comer of the lot they came, and from the vicinity of the all-but-hidden cars—lovers? could this be the activity of island lovers? nothing better to do?—and even, I thought, from as far as the cemetery.

I fought back. Oh, I fought back, scooping the snow wildly, snarling, beating and compressing that snow into white iron
balls and flinging them, heaving them off into the flurry, the thick of the night, but I could find no enemy and it was a hopeless sweat. “Tremlow!” I shouted, raising my head though I felt in tingling scalp and quivering chin the unprotected condition of that bald head as target, “Tremlow! Come out and fight!” A hoarse shout. Unmistakable cry of rage addressed to the phantom bully, the ringleader of my distant past. Perhaps from somewhere, from some dark comer of the world, he heard.

Because it ceased. I saw no one, heard no human sound, no laughter, and the last of the discharged snowballs fell about me in a heavy but harmless patter like the last great duds of a spent avalanche. Final lobbing to earth of useless snowballs. Irregular thudding in the snow. Then safe. Then silence. Only the gentle puffing fall of the now tiny flakes, only the far-off wind, only the muffled sound of Jack Spratt’s Merry Hep Cats commencing once again in my ears. Only the yellow light on the snow. And of course the blood and snot on the back of my hand.

I waited. And slowly I controlled my temper and my pain, controlled my breathing, brushed the palm of my hand over my scalp and regained my usual composure. I was wet and chilled, but I smiled when I saw what an enormous ring I had trampled all about me in the snow. The great stag that had been at bay was no longer at bay. Tremlow, if he had ever been there, was gone. As I walked slowly back along the deep path I had cut from the fire door to the center of the parking lot I forgot about the demon of my past and began to muse about that enemy of the present who was, I knew, only too real. How was it possible, I wondered, for a man to throw snowballs with an artificial hand?

But it was my night of trials and when I returned to the gymnasium, blinking, wiping face and hands with my handkerchief, trying to reset the sparkle in my watering eyes, I saw the two of them at once—Jomo, Cassandra—saw that the hook was buried deep in the bow, that the two of them were dipping together to the strains of a waltz—Jomo leading off with a long leg thrust between her legs—and that Jomo was panting and that his trousers were sopping wet up to the knees. Poor Cassandra like a green leaf was turning, floating, waltzing away out
of my life, a green leaf on the back of the spider. My teen-age bomb and her boy friend. And I might have charged him then and there, might have struck him down when two little white roly-poly women cut me short, caught my arms, hung a numbered placard around my neck, pushed me forward like little tugs—dirt in the girdles, dough in the dimples, mother’s milk to spare—and the music stopped, girls giggled, someone stood on a Coca-Cola crate and shouted: “Take your places, belly-bumpers! Gather about now, folks, for the contest!”

And another voice: “Make them take off their belts, hey, Doc! Buckles ain’t fair!”

And the first: “Ladies, pick your bumpers … bumpers in place … come on now, fellows, we got to start!”

Laughter. Calls of encouragement. Eight pairs of bumpers— including me—to fight it out pair by pair. Then a circle in the crowd, silence, boy with the bass drum and boy with the cornet standing there to beat and blow for each winner. And I who had always considered myself quite trim, heavy but rather handsome of form, holding up my trousers, perspiring now, I was called upon to make sport of myself, to join in the fleshly malice of this island game. Perverse. The death of modesty. But I could not refuse, could not explain that there was some mistake-rising to the catcalls in that human ring—could do nothing but accept the challenge and bump with the best of them and give them the full brunt of belly, if belly they wanted. I noticed that the old-timers were drinking down last minute pitchers of water so that they would rumble. But I was not intimidated. I would show them a thing or two with my stomach which all at once felt like a warhead.
Allons.
…

The fat began to fly. It was an obscene tournament. And if I had lost the night even before my abortive journey to the parking lot, or if I had begun to suffer the hour that would never pass when I first set foot in Jomo’s car, or if I had tasted the thick endlessness of the night with my first hurried mouthful of chocolate cake, knowing that I was sealed more and more tightly into some sort of desperate honeycomb of dead time with every drink the bare-headed marine took from his bottle—drinking to
my frustration, drinking me dry—and if I had already begun my endless sweat at the mere sight of dancers dancing, what then was my dismay among the belly-bumpers? What then my injury—pain of bouncing bags, cramp of belligerence low in the gut—what then my confusion and drugged determination as I stood there facing the glazed eye of time? Dimly I heard Doc’s voice, “Hey there, no hands!” And slowly, slowly, I forced myself to learn the stance with body sagging to the front, back bowed, shoulders drawn tightly to the rear, elbows pulled close to the ribs and sharply bent, hands limp, fingers limp, barely holding up the trousers, forced myself to balance on the balls of my feet, to balance, pull in the chin, thrust, sail forward and bump, shudder, recover. Without moving my feet. Dead time. Spirited dismay.