The Elementals (7 page)

“Odessa,” twisting his large head on his thick neck, he yelled into the back seat, “how you?”

“I’m fine, Mr. Lawton.”

“Odessa,” he demanded, “you ever seen a girl pretty as this one?”

“I never have,” said Odessa calmly.

“I never have either! This is a girl to be reckoned with. She is my only grandchild, and I love her like I love my soul! She is the delight of my old age!”

“You not old, Mr. Lawton,” said Odessa obediently.

“You gone vote for me?” he laughed.

“Oh, sure.”

“You gone get Johnny Red to vote for me, that no-account?”

“Mr. Lawton, I tried to get Johnny to register, but he talks to me ’bout poll tax. I tell him there ain’t no such thing no more, but he still won’t go down and sign up. You got to go talk to him, you want him to vote for you!”

“You tell him I’m not never gone get him out of jail any more if he don’t go down and register.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Odessa.

Lawton McCray smiled grimly, then turned back to India, who was cowering against the violence and vulgarity of her grandfather’s voice.

“How’d you like the funeral yesterday? Big Barbara said it was your first time. I never saw a dead man ’fore I went in the service, but kids grow up quick these days, I s’pose. D’you find it interesting? You gone tell your friends ’bout a Southern funeral? You gone make a report on it in the schoolroom, India?”

“It was very interesting,” said India. She cautiously reached toward him with one slender arm. “Do you mind if I raise the window?” she said with an icy smile. “All the cool air is getting out.” And she hardly let him withdraw his head and shoulders before she vigorously spun the handle.

“Luker!” yelled Lawton McCray at his son, who wasn’t two feet away, “that child has sprung up! That child has grown a head since I last saw her! She is a doll! Glad she didn’t inherit your looks. She’s already ’most as big as you are now, isn’t she! Looks more and more like her mother every day, I s’pose.”

“Yes,” said Luker expressionlessly, “I suppose she does.”

“Come on over here, I want to talk to you for a minute.”

Lawton McCray pulled his son into the shadow of a yellow Caterpillar—though in this place that stank of chemicals, diesel fuel, and phosphorus dust, there could be no real relief from the Alabama sun. Standing with one foot on the serrated maw of the tractor, as if daring it to start up and shovel him high into the air, Lawton McCray held Luker in reluctant conversation for nearly ten minutes.

Each time that India looked out at her father and grandfather she was more surprised that Luker remained so long. On the viable pretense that all the cold air in the car had dissipated, India lowered her window. But even with that, she could hear nothing of what the two men said. Lawton’s voice was uncharacteristically moderated. “What are they talking about?” she asked Odessa. Her curiosity ove
r
came her indisposition to speak to the black woman.

“What else those two got to talk about?” replied Odessa rhetorically. “They talking about Miz Barbara.”

India nodded: that made sense. In another few moments, the two men—one beefy, red-faced, corpulent, and slow-moving, and the other small, quick, dark-skinned, but unburnt, as much like father and son as India and Odessa appeared mother and daughter—moved back toward the car. Lawton McCray thrust his thick arm through the window and grabbed India by the chin. He pulled her halfway out.

“I just cain’t get over how much you look like your mother. Your mother was the prettiest woman I ever saw in my life.”

“I don’t look a bit like her!”

Lawton McCray laughed loudly in her face. “And you talk like her too! I was sorry when your daddy got a divorce. But law, India, he don’t need her when he’s got you!”

India was too ashamed to speak.

“How’s she doing, your mama?”

“I don’t know,” replied India, lying. “I haven’t seen her in seven years. I don’t even remember what she looks like any more.”

“Look in the mirror, India, look in the damn mirror!”

“Lawton,” said Luker, “we got to get going if we’re going to reach Beldame before the tide comes in.”

“You get going then!” yelled his father. “And listen, Luker, you let me know how things are going, you understand me? I’m depending on you!”

Luker nodded significantly.
How things were going
appeared to possess a specific and weighty meaning for both men.

As Luker drove away from the compound of the McCray Fertilizer Company, Lawton McCray raised his arm and held it high in the dust-filled air.

“Listen,” said India to her father, “I don’t have to tell any of my friends, do I, if he’s elected . . . ?”

Chapter
5

Their way lay south through the interior of Baldwin County, down a narrow unshaded secondary road that was bordered by shallow ditches filled with grass and some ugly yellow flower. Beyond the low ramshackle fences of post or wire lay vast fields of leguminous crops that hugged the ground and seemed very cheap and dusty and to have been planted for some reason other than an ultimate ingestion by either man or cattle. The sky was washed out almost to whiteness, and wispy clouds hovered timorously at the horizon on every side, but hadn’t the courage to hang directly above. Now and then they passed some sort of house, and whether that house was five or a hundred years old, its front porch sagged, its sides had been blistered by the sun, its chimney leaned precariously. Dilapidation was consistent, as was the apparent absence of all life. Even India, who had little enough expectation of the excitement of the rural existence, found it remarkable that she had seen not a living thing for fifteen miles: not man, woman, child, dog, or carrion crow.

“It’s dinnertime,” said Odessa. “Ever’body’s inside at the table. That’s why you don’t see nobody. Nobody’s outside at twelve o’clock.”

Even Foley, a town that advertised a population of three thousand souls, appeared deserted when they drove through. Certainly there were cars parked downtown, and Odessa claimed to have seen faces in the bank window, and a police cruiser turned a corner two blocks ahead—but the town was unaccountably empty.

“Would you be out on a day like this?” said Odessa. “You got sense you stay inside where it’s air-conditioned.”

Experimentally, India rolled down her window a little: heat bellowed inside and seared her cheek. The thermometer on the Foley bank had read
103
degrees.

“Good God!” said India. “I hope it’s air-conditioned where we’re going.”

“It’s not,” said Luker. “India, when I was little, and we were coming to Beldame every summer, we didn’t even have electricity, isn’t that right, Odessa?”

“That’s right, and it don’t even work
all
the time now. You cain’t depend on that generator. We got candles at Beldame. We got kerosene lamps. That generator—I don’t trust it. But child, we got a whole drawerful of paper fans.”

India glanced ruefully at her father: to what sort of place was he taking her? What advantages could Beldame have over the Upper West Side, even the Upper West Side in the most miserably hot summer imaginable? Luker had told India that Beldame was every bit as beautiful as Fire Island—a place that India loved—but Fire Island’s inconveniences were only picturesque and quaint. India suspected that Beldame wasn’t civilized, and she feared that she would be not only bored but actually uncomfortable. “What’s the hot water situation?” she asked, thinking that a fair standard by which to judge the place.

“Oh, it don’t hardly take no time to heat up on the stove,” said Odessa. “Got high flames on the stoves at Beldame!”

India asked no more questions. From Foley to the coast was little more than ten miles. The fields gave out and were replaced by a weak-willed stubby forest of diseased pine and scrub oak. In places the undergrowth, thick and brownish and uninteresting, was plotted in white sand. White sand now and then blew across the road, and dunes of white sand rose in the distance. Over a little rise the Gulf of Mexico became visible. It was opalescent blue, the color that the sky ought to have been. The foam that broke at the top of the nearer waves was gray in comparison to the white sand that shouldered the road.

Gulf Shores hove suddenly into sight: a vacation community with a couple of hundred houses and a dozen small stores and conveniences. All the buildings were green shingled and gray roofed, and all the screens on all the windows were rusted. Even if there were few persons actually in residence there now, in the middle of the week, the place at least maintained the illusion of being crowded, and India allowed her hope a little space to rise. Then, as if on purpose to deflate that meager hope, Luker remarked that this stretch of Gulf coastline was known as the Redneck Riviera. He turned off at a sign that read Dixie Graves Parkway, on to a ribbon of asphalt that was sometimes lost beneath a film of white blowing sand. Gulf Shores was put quickly behind them.

On both sides of the road rolled soft white dunes, with here and there a handful of tall stiff grass or a clump of sea roses. Beyond on both sides was blue water; but only on the left side were there breakers. Odessa pointed to the right. “That’s the bay. That’s Mobile Bay. Mobile’s up there—’bout how far would you say, Mr. Luker?”

“About fifty miles.”

“So you cain’t see it,” said Odessa, “but it’s there. And”—pointing to the left—“that’s the Gulf. There’s nothing out there, nothing at all.”

India felt certain of it.

They came to another community, this one with only a couple of dozen houses and no stores at all. Tons of crushed oyster shells that had been laid out over the sand formed the driveways and yards of the houses. Only a few houses were not boarded up, and the place seemed to India the last stage of desolation.

“Is this Beldame?” she asked uneasily.

“Law, no!” laughed Odessa. “This is
Gasqu
e
!”—this said as if India had mistaken the World Trade Center for the Flatiron Building.

Luker pulled into the lot of a gasoline station that had evidently been closed a number of years. The pumps were of a type that India had never even seen before, slender and round with red glass caps that made them look like bishops on a chess board. “This place is closed,” she said to her father. “Are we out of gas?” she asked miserably, wishing all the while that she were standing on the corner of Seventy-fourth Street and Broadway. (How clearly she could see it in her mind!)

“No, we’re fine,” said Luker, pulling around behind the station. “We’ve just got to change cars, that’s all.”

“Change cars!”

Behind the station and attached to it was a small garage. Luker got out of the Fairlane and pulled open the unlocked door. Inside were a jeep and an International Scout. Both vehicles had Alabama plates. Luker took a key that was hanging from a hook just inside, climbed into the Scout, and backed it out. “I want you to help transfer everything, India,” said Luker, and reluctantly, sullenly, India stepped out of the air-conditioned car. In a few minutes all their bags and the boxes of food that had been packed in the trunk and back seat of the Fairlane were piled in the back of the Scout. The Fairlane was put inside the garage, and the door closed again.

“Well,” said India, when Luker and Odessa had climbed into the front of the Scout, “where am I supposed to sit?”

“You get your choice,” said Luker. “You can stand on the running board or you can sit on Odessa’s lap.
Or
—you can ride on the hood.”

“What!”

“But if you ride on the hood, you’ll have to hold on tight.”

“I’ll fall off!” cried India.

“We’ll stop for you,” laughed Luker.

“Goddamn you, Luker, I’d rather walk, I’d—”

“Child!” cried Odessa. “What was that word?”

“It’s too far to walk,” laughed Luker. “Come on, here’s a towel. Put it up on the hood and sit on it. We won’t be going fast, and if you slide off, just be sure you don’t get caught under the back wheels. I used to
love
to ride on the hood! Leigh and I used to
fight
to see who got to ride on the hood!”

India was fearful of scraping her feet if she stood on the running board and sitting in Odessa’s lap was an unthinkable indignity. When Luker refused to leave her there and make a return trip to pick her up, she leaped angrily on to the hood of the Scout. After she had arranged herself on the towel Odessa handed her, Luker drove away from the gas station onto the Gulf beach.

The sensation of riding on the hood of the Scout was not, after all, unpleasant, despite the blowing white sand that crept beneath India’s clothes and lodged beneath her eyelids. Even behind her sunglasses she squinted in the glare. Luker drove slowly, just along the high tide line, and now and then broad arcs of foamy water crept under the tires. Gulls and pipers and four other kinds of birds India couldn’t identify fled at their approach. Crabs scuttled away, and when she peered over the fender she could see a thousand tiny sinkholes in the wet sand, where shelled creatures breathed. Fish leaped in the nearer waves, and Luker, whose voice she could not hear over the heavy surf, pointed away in the distance where, beyond a light green line that must have been a sandbar, a school of porpoises frolicked. In comparison to this, the shore of Fire Island was dead.