Second Skin (24 page)

So I plunged both hands down and collared Bub, held him, dragged the streaming and spitting and frothy face up dose to mine. He had a nosebleed and a little finger-thick abrasion on his upper lip and terror on the narrow sea-white boyish face beneath the dripping duck bill of the baseball cap.

“Where is she,” I said. “Where’s Cassandra?”

And choked and high-pitched and faint but still querulous, still mean: “Him and her is at the lighthouse. Been up there to the lighthouse since sundown. You old fool…"

So for the first and only time in all my lifelong experience with treachery, deception and Death in his nakedness or in his several disguises, I gave way at last to my impulse and put Tremlow’s teaching to the test, allowed myself the small brutal pleasure of drawing blood and forcing flesh on flesh, inflicting pain. Yes, I stood in the choppy and freezing darkness of that black water and contemplated the precise spot where I would punch the child. Because I had gone too far. And Bub had gone too far. The long duck bill of the cap, the cruel tone of his island voice and the saliva awash on his thin white face and even the faint suggestion of tender sideburns creeping down the skin in front of each malformed ear, by all this I was moved, not justified but merely moved, to hit Bub then and there in the face with all my strength.

“Hold still,” I muttered, and took a better grip with my left
hand, “hold still if you know what’s good for you,” I said and, keeping my eyes on the little bloody beak in the center of his white face I pulled back my arm and made a fist and drove it as hard as I could into Bub’s nose. I held him close for a moment and then pushed him away, let him go, left him rolling over in the cold black water where he could fend for himself.

I left him, rinsed my fist, staggered up into the moonlight and shouted, “No, no, Miranda, wait!” Once more I broke into my sloshing dogtrot on Dog’s Head beach, because Miranda was in the hot rod and shifting, throwing the blue and white and orange demon into gear, and waving, driving away. So I was alone once more and desperate and running as fast as I could toward the lighthouse. What heavy steps I took in the sand, how deep those footprints that trailed behind me as I took my slow-motion way down that desolate beach toward the lighthouse.

Slow-motion, yes, and a slogging and painful trot, but after a while I could see that the abandoned white tower of Dog’s Head lighthouse was coming down the beach to meet me, was moving, black cliff and all, in my direction. And crab grass, pools of slime, the rusted flukes of a lost anchor, and then the rotted wooden stairs up the side of the cliff and a bright empty Orange Crush bottle gleaming on the tenth step and then the railing gave way under my hand on the head of the cliff and the wind caught hold of me and the lighthouse went up and up above my craning head. The lighthouse. The enormous overgrown moonlit base of it. The tower that had fought the storms, the odor of high waves in the empty doorway, the terrible height of the unlighted eye—I wanted nothing more than to turn my back on it and flee.

But I cupped my hands and raised my mouth aloft and shouted: “Cassandra.? In the name of God, Cassandra, are you there?”

No answer, of course. Still no word for her father. Only the brittle feet of the luminous crabs, the cough and lap and barest moan of the slick black tide rising now at the bottom of the cliff and working loose the periwinkles, wearing away the stone, only the darkness inside the tower and, outside, the moonlight and the heavy unfaithful wind that was beating me across the
shoulders, making my trousers luff. But of course she was there, of course she was. And had she climbed the circular iron staircase knowing she would never set foot on it again? Or, as in the case of my poor father, was I myself the unwitting tinder that started the blaze? Could she really have intended to spend the last six or eight hours of her life with Jomo in Dog’s Head light? My own Cassandra? My proud and fastidious Cassandra? I thought she had. Even as I approached the black doorless opening in the base of the tower I was quite certain that she had planned it all, had intended it all, knowing that I would come and call to her and force myself to climb that tower, climb every one of those iron steps on my hands and knees, and for nothing, all for nothing. Even as I thrust one foot into the darkness of Dog’s Head light I knew that I could not possibly be in time.

“Cassandra? Don’t play games with me, Cassandra. Please….”

Proud and fastidious, yes, but also like a bird, a very small gray bird that could make no sound. And now she was crouching somewhere in Dog’s Head light—at the top, it would be at the top if I knew Cassandra—or lying in Jomo’s thin brown abrasive arms in the Dog’s Head light. What a bad end for time. What a bad end for the BVM.

“Cassandra? In the name of God, answer me now … Please….”

Iron steps. All those iron steps and on my hands and knees. Bareheaded, sopping wet, afraid of finding her but afraid too of losing her, I started up then and with each step I found it increasingly difficult to pull my fingers loose from the iron steps and to haul the dead weight of my nerveless feet behind me. Up it went, that tower, straight to the top, and the center was empty, the circular iron steps were narrow, there was no rail. Cracks in the wall, certain vibrations in the rusted iron, it was like climbing up the interior of some monstrous and abandoned boiler, and it was not for me, this misery of the slow ascent, this caterpillar action up the winding iron stairway to the unknown.

But taking deep dark breaths and bracing myself now and again and glancing up and at the moonlight fluttering in the
smashed head of the light, I persevered until suddenly, and as if in answer to my clenched jaw and all the sweeping sensations in my poor spine, the whole thing began to shake and sway and ring, and I clenched my fists, tucked in my fingers, bruised my head, hung on.

A long soft cry of the wind—or was it the wind?—and footsteps. Heavy mindless footsteps crashing down, spiraling down from above, heavy shoes trembling and clattering and banging down the iron stairway, and behind the terrible swaying rhythm in the iron and the racket of the shoes I could hear the click, click, click of the flashing mechanical hand as he swung it against the wall with each step he took.

He passed me. He had already passed me—Jomo without his cap, poor Jomo who must have thought Salerno was nothing compared to what he had gotten himself into now—when I heard the breathing beside my ear and then the toneless bell-strokes of catastrophe fading away below in the darkness.

The iron gut of the tower remained intact, and I crawled to the top and crawled back down again without mishap, without a fall. But the damage was done. I knew it was done before I reached the top, and I began to hurry and began to whisper: “Cassandra? He’s gone now, Cassandra, it’s all right now… you’ll see. …” I heard nothing but the echoing black sky and tiny skin-crawling sounds above me and the small splash, the eternal picking fingers of wave on rock below. “Cassandra?” I whispered, tried to pull myself up the last few shaky steps, tried to fight down dizziness, tried to see, “you’re not crying, are you, Cassandra? Please don’t….”

But the damage was done and I was only an old bird in an empty nest. I rolled up onto the iron floor in the smashed head of the lighthouse and crawled into the lee of the low wall and pulled myself into a half-sitting position and waited for the moment when Dog’s Head light must tremble and topple forward into the black scum of the rising tide far below.

“Gone, Cassandra? Gone so soon?” I whispered. “Gone with Gertrude, Cassandra? Gone to Papa? But you shouldn’t have, Cassandra. You should have thought of me….”

The neat pile of clothing was fluttering a little in the moonlight and it was damp to the touch. I could not make myself look down. But I felt that I had seen her already and there was no reason to look down again. So I half-sat, half-lay there in the cold, the moonlight, the wind, stretched myself out amidst the broken glass and debris and thought about Cassandra and was unable to distinguish between her small white oval face—it was up there with me as well as below on the black rocks—and the small white plastic face of the BVM.

“I won’t ask why, Cassandra. Something must have spoken to you, something must have happened. But I don’t want to know, Cassandra. So I won’t ask….”

I clutched a couple of the thin rusted stanchions and in the gray moonlight stared out to sea. The shoals were miles long and black and sharp, long serrated tentacles that began at the base of the promontory and radiated out to sea, mile after square mile of intricate useless channels and breaking waves and sharp-backed lacerating shoals and spiny reefs. Mile after square mile of ocean cemetery that wasn’t even true to its dead but kept flushing itself out on the flood tide. No wonder the poor devils wanted a lighthouse here. No wonder.

I turned again, crept back from the edge and started down. I had climbed to the top of the lighthouse and I was able to climb back down again, feet first. It was a matter of holding tight and feeling my way with my feet and dropping down with little terrible free falls through that tower of darkness. But I managed it. I reached the bottom after all, and I sat on a concrete block in the empty doorway with my head in my hands. I sat there with the lighthouse on my shoulders. And somewhere the tide was rising, the moon was going down, the clouds were scudding. And I sat there while the damp grass sang at my feet and the white tower listed in the indifferent wind.

Ducks in June. Baby ducks in June. I could hear them, Miranda’s brood of little three-day-old cheese-colored ducklings, hear them waddling behind the house on this bright early
dawn in the first week in June, hear them talking to each other and doing their little Hitler march step as I stood by the bright black stove and coaxed the coffee to reach its rich dark aromatic climax so I could sit down to an early breakfast with Pixie. It was a chilly dawn, but outside the sun was out, and inside Miranda’s kitchen the wood-burning stove was as rosy as a hot brick.

“Hear the ducklings, Pixie? You like the little ducklings, don’t you, Pixie?”

She looked up at me from where she sat on the wide soft boards of the wooden floor—bright pudding face, bright platinum hair, on her finger a little tin ring that I had found in a Cracker Jack box—and opened her mouth for me and kicked her little dirty white calfskin shoes and gave the rolling pin a quick push. I smiled. Pixie always enjoyed the game with the rolling pin.

“Shall we go out and play with the ducklings after breakfast, Pixie? Would you like that?”

Fresh white apron, fresh white shirt, fresh creamy taste of the toothpaste in my mouth, and Miranda’s old tin clock said that it was six o’clock in the morning and already I had ground the coffee in the coffee grinder and put the cereal bowls on the table and finished off Pixie’s cold orange juice. And now the sun was shooting golden arrows through the blistered glass in the kitchen window and the stove was warm. The coffee smelled like the new day and was beginning to bubble up into the little myopic eye of the old percolator.

“Where’s the corn flakes, Pixie? Go find the corn flakes….”

Big square whitewashed kitchen, sharp golden arrows of the new sun quivering on the white walls and on the table set for two, old tin clock pattering and twisting and clicking in the throes of the hour, little ducks marching around and around outside and the light frost was beginning to disappear. I dangled a quilted pot holder from my fingers and tended the stove and glanced every once in a while at the waiting table. Because instead of the usual unopened fifth of Old Grand-Dad on the breakfast table for Miranda, there was a package wrapped in white tissue paper and done up in red, white and blue ribbons
and so placed on the table that it could have been meant only for me.

“What do you think is in the package, Pixie? Something for Grandpa? A present for your grandfather, eh, Pixie? Shall we open it after breakfast and then go play with the ducks?” 

There was a card tucked under the ribbon and I had already allowed myself a look at the card—
For
Skip—
in a bold black handwriting, nothing more—while Pixie was busy with the rolling pin I had slipped it out of the envelope and read it and then put it back where I had found it in such a way that not even Miranda could tell the difference. A quick look at the card was one thing, but the present itself, I knew, would have to wait. Perhaps I could even hold off until I had done the dishes though I suspected not.

Corn flakes and cold milk and the bowl of sugar. And then the usual fight with Pixie until I made her drop the rolling pin and was able to pick her up and strap her into the pink enamel chair and give her the jam jar and little silver spoon to play with. And then the coffee. The heat of the spicy beans. The first heat of the day. Better than bacon. But just as I was pouring the coffee and sniffing it and watching the sensual brown metamorphosis in my thin cup, just as I was smiling and getting ready to sit down to breakfast with Pixie, I smelled the sudden odor of a lighted cigarette and felt a movement at the door. I waited and then raised my eyes.

“Miranda,” I said. “Good morning! Have some coffee?”

At six-fifteen in the morning she was standing in the doorway with her long legs crossed and her shoulder leaning against the jamb. Black eyes and sockets, uncombed hair, white face. And after all these months she was wearing the canary yellow slacks again.

“Come on,” I said, “have some coffee. First pot’s the best, isn’t it, Miranda?”

She puffed on her cigarette, exhaled, shook her head.

“Well, Miranda,” and I was stooping, still holding the pot, smiling up at her, “there seems to be some sort of present on the table. We don’t have so many presents around here, do we?” 

And then: “That one’s got your name on it, Skip.”

“Really?” I said. “Well, come on, Miranda, tell me. What is it?”

And slowly and keeping the big formless black eyes on mine and sucking the gray smoke back into her nostrils: “Fetus,” she said, and the big mouth slid down a little as if it might smile.

I turned, set the coffee pot on the edge of the stove, faced her again, took hold of the back of the chair with both my hands. The arrows were quivering on the walls but she was watching me.