The Elementals (12 page)

Dauphin smiled, then remembered that his mother was dead.

Part II

THE THIRD HOUSE

Chapter
10

While Dauphin Savage dreamed that his dead mother had come to the door of his bedroom, India McCray stood at her window and stared at the third house. In the black hour before dawn when the prickled stars were cloud-obscured, and St. Elmo’s Lagoon provided only a scant spectral glow, she could see almost nothing of the building that so intrigued her. With a little shudder, she realized that she had never been in a place so dark as this. All her life she had lived in the city, where night was characterized not by blackness but only by a relative diminution of light. There were streetlamps and neon signs and uncurtained windows, car headlamps and a haze of red reflected light that covered New York from sundown until dawn. At Beldame, in the night, light was extinguished, and India was as if stricken blind.

The silence of the place oppressed her. The waves that broke on the shore, a few dozen yards distant, were an irritating reverberation in her ears and seemed unconnected to any physical source. India felt that the unpredictable and ever-changing pattern of the noise—which was all the more static and monotonous for its undeviating inconstancy—covered a real silence in the place, a sinister waiting silence. Things might move and things might shift themselves without her being able to hear them over the powerful thunder of the waves.

She had been awakened by some jarring noise beneath the regular surf and, knowing that whatever had spoken had spoken in the third house, she had gone immediately to the window. She stood fingering the curtain and cocked her ear. Perhaps the noises she heard after that, creaking doors and breaking glass, were but her imagination. In the waves one could hear anything: the sirens’ call or the scraping tread of the dead on the sand.

The windows of the third house began to reflect the lightening sky in the east. The panes of glass burned a cold gray while the rest of the house remained the same undifferentiated black as the sky beyond it.

India returned to her bed and slept dreamlessly until ten o’clock. When she awakened, she did not remember that she had risen in the hour before dawn.

She did not have breakfast, for everyone else had already eaten and the idea of being specially waited on by Odessa appalled her. She poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot that was keeping warm on the stove and then wandered into the living room of the Savage house. Big Barbara was there alone.

“India,” she said, “come and sit by me.”

India did so, and asked, “How do you feel this morning?”

“Oh, law! This morning I look one day older than God and a year younger than water! Last night I didn’t close my eyes. At five o’clock this morning I was still awake in my bed, turning and tossing and thinking about Big D.”

“Dallas?”

“Dying, precious—Big D is death.”

“Is that because you didn’t have anything to drink last night?”

“Child, that is a rude thing to say to me! I wonder why Luker didn’t feed you a spoonful of manners when you were little!”

India shrugged. “Alcoholism is a disease,” she said. “Like athlete’s foot. Or herpes. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Luker and I have lots of friends who are alcoholics. And speed freaks too.”

“Well, it’s still not what I choose to talk about with my own family. But I tell you what I
do
want to talk about . . .”

“What?”

“I want you to tell me about your life in New York City. I want to know how you spend your days. I want you to tell me about all your little friends, and what you and Luker do when you’re alone together. India, you’re my one and only grandchild and I hardly
ever
get to see you.”

“All right,” said India hesitantly. “You ask me questions and I’ll answer them.” She took a bolstering sip of her black coffee. There were things about her father India knew very well but could not possibly reveal to her grandmother; she must be on her guard to say nothing that would dismay or too much astonish Big Barbara.

“Oh, I’m so happy!” cried Big Barbara. “India, you bring that cup and we’ll go out on our verandah and look at the Gulf. You and I will get the benefit of the breeze.”

Big Barbara and India crossed the yard and seated themselves in the swing on the McCray verandah. If they stood at the porch rail they could see the single blanket on which Luker, Leigh, and Dauphin lay sunning. From her room India retrieved a morsel of sewing, the blue work shirt she was embroidering.

“All right,” she said to her grandmother, snapping the hoop shut around the front pocket, “what did you want to know?”

“I want to know
everything
! You tell me what you want me to hear.”

India thought, then smiled. “I’ll tell you about my mother, how’s that?”

Big Barbara pulled back so quickly that the swing rocked on its chains and India broke a needle against her thimble. “Not a word, child! Don’t mention that woman! That sloozy! I’d like to grind her soul into a blacktopped road! That’s what would make
me
happy!”

“What’s a
sloozy
?” asked India.

“That’s something between a slut and a floozy—and that was your mother!”

“I’m sorry I mentioned her, then. Let’s see. What else can I tell you? I’ll tell you—”

“What do you know about her?” demanded Big Barbara. “You haven’t seen her, have you? Child, that woman left you high and dry. Right now I hope she’s selling encyclopedias door to door, I hope she’s picking potatoes in Louisiana, I hope she’s at the end of the earth, I hope—”

“She lives about two blocks away from us,” said India placidly. “I go to school with this kid who lives in the same building, but he’s on the floor above and I won’t—”

“What!” cried Big Barbara. “Do you mean to tell me you have
seen
her!”

“Of course. I pass her on the street all the time. Not ‘all the time,’ I guess, but once a week maybe. I—”

“Luker told me he had no idea what had become of that woman!”

“Probably he didn’t want to upset you,” said India after a moment.

“He’s not thinking of . . . of a reconciliation? I mean, he’s not
seeing
her, is he?”

“God, no!” India laughed. “He won’t even speak to her. He cuts her dead on the street.”

“You are not to trust that woman, India, do you hear me?” said Big Barbara sternly. “You are to stick your fingers in your ears when she talks to you, and if you see her coming down the street, I want you to turn right around and run the other way as fast as you can. Before you go away I’m going to give you a roll of quarters. I want you to have that money with you at all times, so when you see that woman coming you can jump in the first bus you see and get away from her!”

“She can’t do anything to me,” said India. She rode over what looked to be another interruption from Big Barbara: “Let me tell you about what happened with her, and then you won’t be upset.”

“India, tell me everything! I’d
love
to be alone with that woman and a bathtubful of boiling water!”

India pulled her green-threaded needle through the blue cloth and began, “When Mother ran off, Luker didn’t make up any stories or anything, he just said to me, ‘Your mother has run off, I don’t know where and I don’t know why and to tell you the truth I’m pretty glad about it.’ And so everything was fine for about eight years, and then one day we were on our way to a movie or something, and she came right up to us on the street—I recognized her from her photographs. So she came up to us, and she said ‘Hello,’ and Luker said, ‘Fuck off, bitch’—”

“India!” cried Big Barbara, stunned by the profanity, even if it was only quoted.

“—and we walked off. I didn’t say anything to her. Then one day I was by myself and she saw me on the street and said she wanted to talk to me for a few minutes. So I said okay.”

“Oh, India, what a mistake!”

“So it turned out she lived about two blocks away. She was living with this psychiatrist whose name was Orr, and he was real rich and she had this ditsy job doing PR for an auction gallery.”

“I can’t believe you just let her talk to you like that!”

“Well, it wasn’t so bad. I just sat there and she gave me all this bullshit about how she’d like to have the chance to form some kind of relationship, that the time would come when I needed a mother—”

“You
always
have me!”

“—and I listened to what she had to say, and I said, ‘We’ll see.
’
”

“And was that all that happened?”

“No,” replied India. “Something else happened. One day I was home alone. Luker was shooting in the Poconos and I knew he wouldn’t be back before late. There was a knock at the door, and I went and opened it. She was standing there—I don’t know how she got in the building. If she had rung the buzzer, I wouldn’t have let her in. She had this little bag from Zabar’s and she said, ‘Can I come in and talk to you for a while—I brought you some lox.’ I didn’t want to let her in, but I go apeshit over lox. I don’t know
how
she knew that.”

“The devil knows everything!”

“Anyway, I let her in, and she was very polite and we talked for a few minutes and then she said, ‘Let me go in the kitchen and fix everything.’ She said she had forgotten to get anything to drink, and she gave me a five-dollar bill and told me to go out and buy some Perrier and limes. So I did—”

“You left her alone in Luker’s apartment!”

“Yes,” said India. “It was an asshole thing to do, all right. When I came back with the Perrier, she was already gone—and she even took the lox with her!”

“And what else? She must have done something else!”

“She did. She went to the refrigerator and took a bite out of everything that was in there. I had just made three dozen chocolate chip cookies, and there was a bite taken out of every one of ’em. She punched teeny-tiny holes in all the eggs and turned ’em upside down. She peeled all the bananas, and squeezed out all the almond paste. There was this new loaf of bread, and she opened it and she took a cookie cutter and cut out the middle of every slice. She punched holes in the bottom of the canister set, and she mixed all the spices together in the Cuisinart. And she got out the punch bowl and poured in every bottle of wine and liquor in the house!”

“Oh, no!” groaned Big Barbara. “You poor child! What did you do?”

“I was upset, because I didn’t know how I was going to explain to Luker what had happened. I sat down and cried and cried, and when Luker came home all he said was that I was a real asshole for letting her in. He said I should have poked her eyes out and ripped her tits off and slammed the door in her face.”

“That’s what I would have done,” said Big Barbara complacently. “But did Luker have her arrested?”

“No, we just called her up. He was on one extension and I was on the other, and when she answered it we both blew police whistles as loud as we could. He said we probably broke her eardrum and there must have been blood all over her phone. And now when we see each other on the street we don’t even speak. One time Dr. Orr—the psychiatrist she lives with—called me up and said he wanted to talk to me about mother-daughter relationships in general, but I told him to drop dead in a shed, Fred.”

“Oh, child!” cried Big Barbara, embracing her granddaughter. “If it weren’t for your language, I would say that Luker had raised you as a child for us all to be proud of!”

Chapter
11

Big Barbara had exaggerated when she told India that she had not closed her eyes all night. Nothing could keep that woman from sleep, but a very little could prevent her from sleeping well. After Odessa had served up a lunch of hamburgers and potato chips, Big Barbara put on her bathing suit and commandeered the blanket that had been laid on the Gulf beach. A few minutes later Luker came over and draped a large towel over his mother’s sleeping body so that she would not burn. In deference to Big Barbara’s modesty, Luker carried another blanket farther down the beach out of sight of the three houses before he took off his bathing suit and lay naked in the sun.

“You’re disgusting,” said India, waking him an hour or so later.

He opened his eyes, shaded them and looked up at her; but in the glare he could make out only her colorless outline against the sky. “Why?” he whispered; for the sun had leached out not only his energy and his intellect but his voice as well.

“The way you tan,” she replied. “You haven’t been in the sun in six months, but you’re out here one day, and already you’re starting to go dark brown.” India wore long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and her coolie hat. She seated herself in the sand beside him. “And look at me. The only part of me that’s uncovered is my feet, and they’re already starting to burn.”

“Tough shit,” said Luker.

“Can I borrow your camera?”

“Sure. But you have to be careful. It’s very easy to get sand in it out here. What are you going to take pictures of?”

“The third house, of course. What else?”

Luker said nothing for a moment. “I thought you wanted
me
to take pictures of it,” he said carefully.

“No, I decided that I would do it. You’re not going to, that’s obvious.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I know you. You won’t go near the place. If I asked you to do it, you’d put me off and put me off. So I decided I’d do it myself.”

“India,” said Luker, “I don’t want you climbing that dune again. It’s dangerous. You nearly cut your foot off up there yesterday. Let that be a lesson. And don’t go up on the verandah either. I don’t think those boards are safe. You could fall through. Those splinters would eat you alive.”

“Whenever you come back to Alabama, you start acting like a father. India, do this; India, don’t do that. Listen, the third house is just as safe as the other two, and you know it. Lend me your camera and let me take a few pictures. I’m not going to make a big deal of it, and I’m certainly not going inside—at least not today. I just want to get some shots of what it looks like from different angles, how the sand is taking over. I can’t believe that you’ve never taken any pictures of it—you could have sold about a million prints.”

“Listen, India. Nobody knows about Beldame, and if people find out there are these three perfect Victorian houses down here, they’re going to be out here in droves. Beldame has never been robbed, and I don’t intend to give people any ideas.”