Second Skin (14 page)

“You see, Josie,” smiling, raising my hand, gesturing, feeling the ocean breeze on my neck and smelling the lively activity of the fields of sunken offal in the swamp, breathing deeply and seeing how the pale blue-green light of the ocean met the dark greens and heavy yellows of the swamp, “you see, Josie, a true freak of nature. Wonderful, isn’t it? And that fisherman’s hut, who knows what’s been going on in that fisherman’s hut, eh, Josie? How about it now, a few small sacrifices to the gods?”

And head lowered, eyes lowered, voice soft and serious: “Sometimes she sleep there, sir.”

The ants were racing through the holes in my tennis shoes and the tide was a rhythmic darkening of the sand and something was beating great frightened wings in the swamp. There were bright yellow turds hanging from a soft gray bough over the hut, and I began to scratch. But then I looked down and saw what I had somehow failed to see in my first sweeping glance at the warmer side of the sand shelf and beginning of the swamp. And I took slow incredulous footsteps down that sandy incline, leaned forward, held out my hands.

“Kate. Are you all right, Kate?”

She was lying there and watching me. Must have been watching me all the time. Lying there on her stomach. Chin in her hands. Naked. Legs immersed halfway up the calves in the warm yellowish pea soup of that disgusting water. And stuck to her back, spread eagle on her broad soft naked back, an iguana with his claws dug in.

“Kate, what is it, Kate. …

But she only smiled. I stopped, hand thrust out, and kneeled on one knee in front of Catalina Kate who had the terrible reptile clinging to her back. His head reached her shoulders, his tail dropped over her buttocks, and he might have been twenty or
thirty pounds of sprawling bright green putty. Boneless. Eyes like shots in the dark. Gorgeous bright green feathery ruff running down the whole length of him. Thick and limp and weak, except for the oversized claws which were grips of steel. Kate was looking at me and smiling and the iguana was looking at me, and I heard the noise of locust or cricket or giant swamp fly strangling behind a nearby bush.

“Hold on, Kate,” I whispered, “don’t move. Just leave him to me.

So then I rose carefully from my position on one knee and tried to think of what to do, of how to go about it. There at my feet was Kate, and she was stretched out flat on the sand, had dug a nice deep oval hole for her belly, and her naked skin was soft and broad, mauve and tan, and the shadows all over her arms and calves and flanks were like innumerable little bright pointed leaves. At one end of her the scum from the swamp water lay in fluffy white piles against her calves; at the other her black hair was heaped up in a crown, shaped in oil, and the long thick braid hung down over one shoulder into the sand. A child with real pink sea shells for ears, child with a disappointing nose but with lips as thin as my own and bowed, moist, faintly violet and smiling. A dark mole—beauty mole—on one cheek. Body as big as Big Bertha’s. A garden, but shaped by her youth. There at my feet. Kate.

And on her back the monster.

So I straddled her—colossus over the reptile, colossus above the shores of woman—and hearing the lap and shifting of the sea, and wiping my palms on my thighs and leaning forward, I prepared to grapple with the monster. My eyes were already shut and my hands already feeling downwards, groping, when Josie, little Sister Josie, took courage—for her it must have been courage—and called out to me.

“Oh, no, sir. No, sir. Don’t touch iguana, sir. Him stuck for so!”

She had risen from her seat on the stump in front of the fisherman’s hut, wringing her hands, squeezing her ankles together beneath her skirts, doll in the sunshine, straight and small,
but sat down again quickly as soon as I glanced at her. Little black face, pained eyes, ankles and knees and hands all rigid and pinched together, unbearable hot weight of cowl and little buttoned shoes and God knows how many skirts. I was in no mood to take advice from Sister Josie and told her so.

“That’s all right, Josie,” I said. “I’ll handle this.”

From inside the rich brown layers of drapery or from one of her sleeves she produced a tiny Bible and licked a finger, began to read. She looked like a little black beetle hunched up and reading the Bible in the sunlight. The forked tongues were crying out in the swamp. I shook my head. And lunged down for the iguana.

I got him with the first grab. Held him. Waited. And with my feet buried deep in the sand, my legs spread wide and locked, my rump in the air, tattered shirt stuck to my skin like a plaster, nostrils stoppered up with the scum of the swamp, heart thumping, I made myself hold on to him—in either hand I gripped one of the forelegs—and fought to subdue the repellent touch of him, fought not to tear away my hands and run. Cool rubber ready to sting. Feeling of being glued to the iguana, of skin growing fast to reptilian skin.

“Now,” I said through clenched teeth, and opened my eyes, “now we’ll see if you’re any match for Papa Cue Ball.” And slowly I pulled up on him, gently began to wrestle with him. He yielded his putty, stretched himself, displayed a terrible elasticity, and everything rose up to my grasp except the claws.

“It’s just like being in the dentist’s chair, Kate,” I muttered, and grinned through my own agony, “it’ll be over soon.” But Catalina Kate gave no sign of pain, though now her head was resting on her folded arms and her eyes were closed. So I kept pulling up on the iguana, tugged at him with irritation now. With every tug I seemed to dig the claws in deeper, to drag them down deeper into the flesh of poor Kate’s back in some terrible inverse proportion to all the upward force I exerted on the flaccid wrinkled substance of the jointless legs or whatever it was I hung on to so desperately. And he wouldn’t budge. Because of those claws I was unable to pull him loose, unable to
move him an inch, was only standing there bent double and sweating, pulling, muttering to myself, drawing blood.

“Well, Kate,” I said, and let go, stood up, wiped my brow, “it looks as if he’s there for good. Got us licked, hasn’t he, Kate? Licked from the start. He means to stay right where he is until he changes his mind and crawls off under his own power. So the round goes to the dragon, Kate. I’m sorry.”

I climbed off, dipped my hands in the scummy water—even scummy water was preferable to the iguana—rubbed them, wiped them on my trousers, mounted the slope, flung myself down in the sand beside Sister Josie. And grimacing, pulling the visor down fiercely over my eyes, “There’s nothing to do but wait,” I said. “We’ll have to be patient.”

“She plenty patient already, sir. She already waiting.”

“That’s right, Josie,” I said, “you young ladies better stick together.”

Sister Josie read her Bible, I twirled Uncle Billy’s crucifix on its gold chain until the sun came down. And we waited. Coconuts knocking together, sun drenching the sand, dry bones scraping in the middle of the swamp, peacock tails of ugly plants fanning and blazing around the edge of the swamp, a little pall of late afternoon heat settling over us. Like Sonny and Big Bertha and the rest of them I must have dozed. Because suddenly I was leaning forward to the stillness of the warm south and trembling, giving the nun a signal on her little knee. “Do you see, Josie? Do you see? The iguana moved!”

It was true. He had unhooked his claws and slid down onto Kate’s right hand and deep rosy shoulder and upper arm, and now his ruff was humming, his tongue flexing in swordplay, swishing in all the tiny hues of the rainbow, and the eyes were dashing together like little sparks.

“He’s hungry! Do you see that, Josie? He’s hungry now, he’s going off to hunt flies! Thank God for Kate. …”

So he plopped from her shoulder and waddled down to the scum, this bright aged thing livid in the last thick rays of the sun, and inch by steady inch pushed himself under the lip of a broad low-hanging yellow leaf and into the scum, and lashing
his tail, kicking suddenly with his stubby rear legs, he disappeared. Succubus. I would have gone after him with a stone had it not been for the failing light and for Catalina Kate who had raised herself up on her arms and was smiling and beckoning and opening to me like some downy swamp orchid.

I ran to her and sank down next to her, panting, brushing the sand from her breasts.

“Well done, Kate!” I whispered, “well done, my brown Joan of Arc. You know about Joan of Arc, don’t you, Kate? The lady burned up in the fire?”

Smiling. But a gentle smile and only faintly visible. A color in the face. Touch of serenity about the eyes and at the corners of the mouth. Nothing but the radiance of the fifteen or sixteen years of her life on this our distant shore, our wandering island.

I took her hand. I covered her back with the remnants of my own dissolving shirt and I reached down into the enormous egg-shaped hole in the sand and helped Kate to feel with her soft young fingers what I could feel with mine: the warmth of the recent flesh and the little humped hieroglyphic in the warm sand.

“Feel the baby, Kate? Unborn baby down there in the sand, eh, Kate? But no more iguanas, you must promise me that. We don’t want to let the iguana get the baby, you know.”

She nodded. Kate understood. And that’s all there was to it. I helped her to her feet and arm in arm we climbed the little velvet slope of sand together and walked up to Sister Josie—another sign of the cross, big gold flash of teeth—who rose, held out her arms and embraced my own nude Catalina Kate. That’s all there was to it. Except walking back alone to Plantation House in our moment of darkness, brushing aside the leaves and thorns and stumbling knee-deep in the salty foam, I saw the few lights and long black silhouette of a ship at sea and smiled to myself since apparently our wandering island has become quite invisible. Only a mirage of shimmering water to all the ships at sea, only the thick black spice of night and the irregular whispering of an invisible shore.

So now I sit staring at the long black cigars and at the bottle
of French wine. Perhaps I will open the French wine when the child is born, drink off the French wine when the child is born on the Night of All Saints. And now I goad myself with the distant past.

So hold your horses, Miranda! Father and Gertrude and Fernandez, sleep! Now take warning, Tremlow!

“We can sell the tires along the way if we have to, Papa Cue Ball,” said Fernandez, as in pairs we rolled them—white walls, retreads, dusty black tires as smooth as balloons—from his little improvised garage to his old disreputable forest green sedan. “Besides, I couldn’t leave them behind. They might be stolen. Nobody’s honest these days, Papa Cue Ball. The war makes everybody steal.”

“You know best, Fernandez,” I said. “But there isn’t room for all these tires. And what will your bride think of setting off on her honeymoon in a car loaded up to the hilt with black market tires? Not very
sympathique
, Fernandez?”

“Look, Papa Cue Ball, look here,” letting two fat ones roll to a stop against a fender, and then leaping into the car, leaping back into the dust again, “I throw out the seat—so—I throw out all this ugly stuff from the trunk compartment—what would anyone be doing with all these rags—and we have plenty of room for the tires. As to your second objection,” stooping to the nearest tire, glaring up at me darkly—I hastened to give him a hand—and speaking slowly and in the most severe of his Peruvian
accents, “it will be a very short honeymoon, Papa Cue Ball, I assure you. A very short honeymoon.”

I smiled. In the long summer twilight of the trailer camp-soft magenta light through temporary telephone poles and brittle trees, distant sound of schoolboys counting off like soldiers, sound of tropical birds caged up behind a neighbor’s salmon-colored mobile home—and with his little shoulders square and hard under the white shirt, and his trousers, little tight pleated trousers, hitched as high as the second or third rib, and wearing the white linen shirt and crimson braces and the rattlesnake belt and tiny black pointed boots, surely Fernandez looked like a miniature Rudolph Valentino—eyes of the lonely lover, moistened lips—and I could only admire him and smile.

“Short but passionate, Fernandez?” I said then, and laughed.

“Don’t try to be indelicate with me, Papa Cue Ball. Please.” “You misunderstand me, Fernandez,” I said, and paused, frowned, extended my hand. “Since you have married my daughter I thought I could speak to you—well—frankly, and also joyously.”

“OK, OK, good Papa Cue Ball. Let’s forget it.”

“Just as you say, Fernandez,” I said, and reached out, took his small cool hand in mine, shook hands with him. “I share your happiness, Fernandez, I want you to know that,” I said, and for a moment I leaned against the old waiting automobile and my head was light and my mouth was dry and tart and bubbling with the lingering dry aroma and lingering taste of the warm champagne. Because I had considered champagne indispensable. And I had supplied the champagne, carried it to the City Hall in a paper bag, and after the service and in the dim institutional corridor between the City Clerk’s office and a Navy recruiting office we three had sipped our warm champagne straight from the bottle. I had counted on paper cups, but as luck would have it, the water cooler was dry and filled with dust and there was not one paper cup to be found in the holder. Toward the end of the bottle, when there were only a few drops of our celebrative wine remaining, I kissed the bride, there in the dark corridor of the City Hall. And now I remembered the kiss, the
champagne, the City Clerk with dirty fingernails, and I wanted only to please Fernandez, to please Cassandra, to make the day end well.

So I did my share of the work and together we rolled the last of the unruly bouncing tires out to the waiting Packard and stowed them aboard. The chickens, little red bantams, and little white frightened hens, were cackling in the makeshift garage and squawking in sudden alarm, and I was tempted to toss them my remaining left-hand pocketful of confetti—yes, I had thrown my fiery flakes of confetti at Cassandra on the hot sidewalk in front of the red brick City Hall—but Fernandez had told me that the chickens were good layers and I thought better of it, left the confetti in the pocket where it was. Instead I stooped and clucked at the chickens, tried to nuzzle a little white stately hen under my arm. But it was a suspicious bedraggled bird and much too quick for me.

“The car needs some water, good Papa Cue Ball,” Fernandez called from the steps of his stubby one-man aluminum trailer—it sat on blocks like a little bright bullet in the fading sunlight—so while Fernandez gathered together his guitar and cardboard suitcase and extra pair of shoes and drew down the shades and locked the trailer, I managed to attach the hose to the outdoor spigot, pried open the enormous and battered hood, braced myself against the smashed-in grille and filled up the great black leaking radiator. Then I flung down the hose—nozzle lashing about in a perverse and frenzied circle, lashing and taking aim and soaking the lower half of my fresh white uniform—and dropped the hood and wiped my hands on an oily rag, straightened my cap, smoothed down the pure white breast of my tunic and gently shooed away the chickens and patted the old battered-up green hood of the car. The sun was going down, the champagne was tingling and Cassandra, I knew, was waiting where I had left her with Gertrude at the U-Drive-Inn.

“Ready, Fernandez?” I called. “Bride’s waiting, Fernandez.”

Then Fernandez must have felt the champagne also because suddenly the three broken car doors were tied shut with twine and I was behind the wheel and the sun was turning to gold the
tall white plastic Madonna screwed to the dashboard and Fernandez was sitting up straight beside me with a bunch of crimson flowers in one hand and a large unlabeled bottle of clear liquor in the other. I waved to a fat red bantam hen, and the two of us, Fernandez and I, called good-by forever to his life in the splendors of Tenochtitlan Trailer Village. As we drove out between the rows of mobile homes—wingless airplanes, land yachts, or little metal hovels with flat tires and sagging aerials—suddenly I had the impulse to pat Fernandez on the knee, and did so and smiled at him through the sunlight which was full in my face.

“Courage, Fernandez,” I said softly. “She’s a charming girl.”

“Don’t worry about me, Papa Cue Ball,” cradling the bottle, clutching the flowers in his tiny bright mahogany fist, “Fernandez is no innocent.”

Sand flats, mountains of gravel, abandoned road-working machines, conveyer belts, fields of marsh and silver oil tanks, hitchhiking soldier, a pony ring, and the aged dark green Packard swaying and knocking and overheating on that black highway south.

“Faster, Papa Cue Ball, the hour is very late.”

Nonetheless I thought we had better eat—hamburgers in toasted golden buns at the side of the road, butter and pickle juice running through our fingers, two cold bottles of Orange Crush for the dark-faced groom and perspiring good-natured naval officer who gave the bride away—and my better sense told me that someone must attend to the Packard—unpardonable delay in lonely service station, gallons of gasoline, buckets of water, long minutes in the rest room where we, Fernandez and I, took our first drink of the colorless liquor which burned away the Orange Crush and killed the champagne—so that the sky was dark and the moon was a lemon curd by the time we reached the little suburban oasis called El Chico Rio and honked the horn in a prearranged enthusiastic signal—so many longs, so many shorts, so many trills—and parked in front of Gertrude’s accommodations in the U-Drive-Inn.

“Where are the flowers, Fernandez?” I whispered, and set the
hand brake. “Quickly, hold the flowers up where she can see them.”

“The flowers were foolish, Papa Cue Ball.” Glum. Somber. Squaring his shoulders at the Madonna. “I dropped them in the big wire basket in the toilet back there at the Texaco station. A good place for them.”

But I pushed him out of the car then, straightened his linen jacket, squeezed his hand, and turned, smiled, removed my stiff white cap—civilian habit I was never able to overcome—because Gertrude’s door had opened and there was a light on the path and Cassandra was walking toward us carefully in high heels, and Cassandra was composed, calm, silvery and womanly and serene as she came walking toward Fernandez and myself and the old hot smashed-up Packard in these her first moonlit moments of matrimony. I caught my breath, held out my arms to her. And glancing down, I whispered, “Kiss her, for God’s sake, Fernandez. Look how she’s dressed up for us. You must do something!”

And it was true. Her hair was down, yet drawn back slightly so that we could see the little diamond pendants she had clipped to the lobes of her tiny ears; her waist was small and tight and her little silver breasts were round; she was cool, her dress was crocheted and white; and in honor of Fernandez, in honor of his Peruvian background, she wore draped across her narrow shoulders a long white Indian shawl with a fringe made of soft white hair that hung down below her knees. She carried a black patent leather purse, new, and also new a small black patent leather traveling bag monogrammed, I discovered once she got into the car, with a large golden initial C. We could smell the perfume and breath of talcum powder and sharp odor of nail polish—pink as the color of a peach near the stem, still wet-even before she reached the car, and I felt myself choking and gave Fernandez a shove, and dropped my cap and reached out and caught up the purse, caught up the traveling bag. Pride. Embarrassment. My daughter’s porter.

But he did not kiss her. He merely secured the bottle of liquor under one arm and put his little heels together and bowed, bent low over Cassandra’s soft white hand. The fingers of her other
hand—two silver bracelets, a silver fertility charm—were curled at the edge of the high tight collar and her eyes were bright. Then I saw her breasts heaving again and knew that everything was up to me.

“Well, Cassandra,” I said, “my little bride at last!”

“My bride, Papa Cue Ball,” ruffled, holding the bottle by the neck, “you misunderstand, Papa Cue Ball.”

“Naturally, Fernandez,” I said, and smiled and felt Cassandra touch my arm and wished that I hadn’t already kissed the bride in the City Hall. “But are we ready to go? And shall I drive, Fernandez? I’d be happy to drive. If only you two could sit in back. …”

“The three of us will sit in the front seat, Papa Cue Ball. Naturally. And remember, please, this is my honeymoon, the honeymoon of Fernandez. I am the new husband and on my honeymoon my wife will do the driving. So that’s settled. The wife drives on the honeymoon. And you will sit in the middle if you please, Papa Cue Ball. So let’s go.”

I helped Cassandra into the car and managed to jam her traveling bag among the tires and slid in beside her, sighed, settled down with Cassandra’s purse in my lap and her smooth white ceremonial shawl just touching my knee. It was the first time Fernandez had cracked the whip, so to speak, and she took it well, Cassandra took it well. I glanced at her—mere doll behind the wheel, line of firmness in her jaw, little soft hands tight and delicate on the wheel—and her eyes were glistening with a new light of pride, joy, humility. Obedient but still untamed. Shocked. Secretly pleased. Mere helpless woman but summoning her determination, pushing back her hair, suddenly and with little precise white fingers turning the key in the ignition and, with the other hand, taking hold of the gearshift lever which in Cassandra’s tiny soft hand was like a switchman’s tall black iron lever beside an abandoned track.

“Got your license with you, Cassandra?” I asked. “But of course you do,” I murmured in answer to my own question and smiled, caressed the little black patent leather purse in my lap, then balanced the purse on my two raised knees, played a little
game of catch with it. How carefully, slowly, Fernandez climbed back into the old Packard which he himself was unable to drive, and then took hold of the broken door handle and pulled, pulled with all his might so that the door slammed shut and the car shook under the crashing of that loose heavy steel. Another side of Fernandez? A new mood? I thought so and suddenly realized that the enormous outdated Packard with all its terrible capacity for noise and metallic disintegration was somehow a desperate equivalent of my little old-world Catholic son-in-law in his hand-decorated necktie and crumpled white linen suit.

“OK, Chicken,” he said, another vagary of temper, another cut of the lash, and without a word to me he thrust the bottle in my direction, “we want to head for the hideaway. And please step on the gas.”

“I’m with you,” I wanted to say to Cassandra as I took the bottle, held the purse in one hand and the tall clear bottle in the other, “don’t be afraid.” But instead, “Away we go!” I cried, and rolled my head, glanced at Cassandra, put the clear round mouth of the bottle into my own aching mouth and shut my eyes and burned again as I had first burned when I leaned against the tin partition in the Texaco filling station and sampled the rare white liquor of the Andes.

“My wife drives well. Don’t you think so, Papa Cue Ball?”

“Like Thor in his chariot,” I said. “But a toast, Fernandez, to love, to love and fidelity, eh, Cassandra?”

Moonlight, cold dizzying smell of raw gasoline, dry smell of worn upholstery, sensation of devilish coiled springs and lumps of cotton in the old grease-stained front seat of the Packard, wind singing through Cassandra’s door and the hot knocking sound of the engine and a constellation of little curious lights winking behind the dashboard, and I was snug between Cassandra and my son-in-law of several hours now, and the Madonna was standing over me and holding out her moon-struck plastic arms in benediction. She was the Blessed Virgin Mary, I knew, and I smiled back happily at her in the moonlight.

“Skipper?” Cassandra was staring ahead, whispering, driving with her bright new wedding ring high on the wheel, “Light me
a cigarette. Please.” So I opened the purse—how long now had I been waiting for an excuse to open that purse? for a chance to get a peek inside that purse even in the smelly darkness of the speeding car?—and found the cigarettes and a little glossy unused booklet of paper matches and put one of her cigarettes between my lips and struck one of the matches—puff of orange light, sweet taste of sulphur—and smelled the blue smoke, and placed the white cigarette between the fingers which she held out to me in the V-for-victory sign. And during all the long miles we chalked up that night—tunnels of love through the trees, black Pacific deep and hungry and defiant down there below the highway, which was always honeymoon highway to me when that night had passed—and until we reached the hotel far up in the mountains, that was all Cassandra said to me, but it was enough. She had changed. There is a difference between a young bride with crimson flowers and a young woman driving a dirty old forest green Packard with her white pointed toe just reaching the accelerator and a cigarette burning in her pretty mouth. What bride wants to keep her eyes on the road? So she had changed. She would never lose the invisible encyclopedia balanced on the crown of her head and would always be identified for me with the BVM. But behind her anticipation—why else the new purse? why else the patent leather traveling bag? or why the monogram?—and behind whatever vision she may have had of matrimony, there was a change. Still hopeful, still feeling joy, but smoking an unaccustomed cigarette and tasting fate. In the darkness I noticed that one of her pendant earrings had disappeared, and I was sorry and irritated at the same time, wanted to tell her to remove its mate or to let me take it off myself. But I held my peace.