Waveland (2 page)

Even before Katrina, when Waveland was all there, it wasn't a high-toned beachfront town; it was more like ten miles of down-on-its-luck trailer park. After the storm it was ten miles of debris, snapped telephone poles, shredded sheets in the trees. More than a year later there were only a couple of new houses on the beach highway where doctor-types had picked up the distressed property, the better to spend a couple of weekends each summer looking at the Mississippi Sound, a muddy sump you could walk straight out into for a mile and the water wouldn't rise much above your ankles. The town was mostly empty lots, loose rubble, FEMA trailers sprouting yellow extension cords, tents, garbage, and lots of photo opportunities—boats standing on their noses, cars jackknifed, garages flattened like cardboard boxes. The media people had stayed maybe a week or two after the storm before fleeing for the sexier story in New Orleans—death on the rooftops, Sean Penn in the water up to his pecs. On the Mississippi coast recovery was ridiculously slow, almost nonexistent. There wasn't much to recover since there wasn't much
there
anymore, just flattened houses and empty lots piled with rubbish and wreckage. The Waveland city elders were talking about becoming part of Bay St. Louis, the next town east.

The beach road curved out to a dead end ten miles west. There were a half-dozen stilt houses still on the road; the rest had been blown to smithereens. A mile inland another highway slanted up to Interstate 10 in the west and, going east, ran across the bay to Pass Christian, Gulfport, and Biloxi.
Only now the bridge was all pilings and no roadway. Waveland was like Baghdad if the Air Force had hit it really hard—gone. Where property had been spared by the storm, most businesses were boarded up. The nearest gas station had one functioning island, clogged toilets, and soap dispensers half full of pink goo and dripping. There were no locks on any doors, where there were doors.

The divorce was as pristine as could be. A delicate trading of papers conducted through lawyers they picked out of the Yellow Pages. When they saw each other, Vaughn wept, and Gail did not weep. She was the poster girl for lack of affect. She wasn't nasty, though; she was sensible as they went about the division of things, but this made him feel worse. He was shocked at everything—at being alone, shunted back to living as if he were twenty-five, at how much time there was in a day, at the way the air went still if he wasn't disturbing it. Occasionally he went into frenzy mode, cleaning everything in sight in his apartment, straightening furniture, polishing silverware, vacuuming the floors again and again, and that was satisfying, but it didn't last. He liked things clean, so there was always plenty to do, but his enthusiasm waned.

They set out to make the divorce simple, but the way it actually went off, by mail and telephone, with lawyers they barely knew, it was like a drive-through deal, almost as though they'd never been married in the first place. Before he knew it, the legal stuff was over and he was in his second new apartment and she was at the house and three months had gone by. Papers came in the mail. He signed them and
pushed them back into the return envelope. The envelope was gray. The world was different. Days were longer, nights were unbearable. Sleep was a paradise.

When he told Greta about the birthday dinner, she said, “Fine.” She had just come in the kitchen door and he'd met her there, so they were standing in the kitchen. He went to the sink and washed his hands using the dishwashing liquid, which had a filmy feel to it.

“Maybe she wants something else, maybe she has some ideas,” he said.

“Don't you get started,” Greta said.

“She wouldn't call if she didn't want something.”

“Maybe she's lonely. Maybe she wanted to wish you Happy Birthday.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “But I talked to her like once in the last year and now she wants to take us out to dinner.”

“I talked to her more than you did,” Greta said. This was true. After Vaughn introduced Greta, back in the summer, she and Gail became phone pals for a while. “We're buds.”

“You're in the paper, apparently,” he said. “Gail said she read it. Pictures, the whole thing.”

“I know,” Greta said. “It'll pass. I have it in the car if you want to read it. I was going to bring it in, but I guess I thought maybe we could just skip it.”

“Fine by me,” Vaughn said. “There's no point in shooting
me
anyway.”

“Funny,” she said.

“So, anyway, we've got to go to dinner with Gail, and
I'm thinking she's got an ulterior motive, something up her sleeve.”

He could almost hear Greta rolling her eyes. “I hate to tell you this,” Greta said, “but I think she's over the divorce and ready to be friends again. It'll be fine.”

“What about me?”

“You are not over the divorce, but you'll be fine, too, eventually. You can do this, Vaughn. You're the man. You're Mr. Nice Guy.”

“Thanks,” he said. This was Greta's final answer to his idea of a new personality. She used it all the time.

“You should stop worrying. It'll be easy and pleasant, and anyway, it would be better if you and she talked more—you know, like friends or something.”

“Okay. We'll have a nice dinner and all that. It won't be so bad. You'll go with me, right? And we're not worrying about it.”

“Now you're talking,” Greta said. “I wouldn't miss it. But right now I'm going to yoga.”

“You are? You just got home.”

“It's okay, Vaughn. I'm coming back afterward.” She kissed his cheek, picked up her yoga gear, and left again.

He watched her back out of the driveway and then went to the computer and tried a more general search: “husband killers.” One million seven hundred and eighty thousand entries in six-tenths of a second. He read a few of those, including “I fight my husband's killer with laughter” and several other choice headlines. Then he tried “beheadings,” which produced eight hundred and twenty-one thousand hits and numerous videos. He started a couple of those, then gave it up. Years before he'd been interested in grotesque news, had
put together a site that featured news like the woman who cooked her husband in a pot, the couple who kept their dead relatives in plastic bags, the father who buried his child to the neck in ants. There was a surprising amount of that going on, he discovered, then, as now; only now he wasn't that intrigued. Now he was thinking: With Google, why bother with school?

He did a vanity search and found references to buildings he'd worked on for architects here and there, and one entry for a monograph he'd cowritten in college on the work of Bruce Goff and Herb Greene. It was available at a used bookstore in Arkansas.

Eventually he gave up on the computer and went back to the television, letting the broadcasts wash over him. There was too much of everything. He flipped between a show on illegal aliens and another show on the child sex trade in Cambodia, both reruns. The Cambodia show featured a touchy dentist from the States who was tricked in Phnom Penh into talking about how he liked to take seven-year-olds to his hotel room.

“These children are so dear to me,” this guy said in his tissuey little voice. “I have visited this nation several times a year since I first started coming in the nineteen-eighties, and it is such a lovely country, such sweet people.”

Vaughn felt sorry for the guy, this earnest pedophile. He was being kneecapped by the TV people and didn't seem to understand that; he just kept on confessing. But he deserved to be kneecapped, so Vaughn settled in to watch, thinking of the guy's family and loved ones, the people who depended on him and who cared for him back in Lincoln, Nebraska, or Continent, Georgia. He was a creepy little man, all hair and
no forehead. He seemed to have a constant and insatiable hankering for the Cambodian boys, but on this day he was the star of the show. He was pleased. He was smiling. He was the pedophile unfairly tricked by cruel documentary filmmakers, a case study in the modern.

Greta had the rode-hard-and-put-up-wet look that he was a sucker for—a look few women could pull off because, if you had it, you were traveling so close to skanky, cheap, and beat down all the time that it was easy to mistake one for the other. But she had it mastered; she never missed. Before the husband, her family was a story. Father died when she was a kid. Raised by her mother, single parent, messy childhood and adolescence, small college to study interior design; then her mother died and left her a little pile of cash and the bungalow in Waveland. She didn't like her mother much but was grateful for the leavings. Then the marriage, then that went haywire and she moved to Waveland, where she restored the house to its original specs, cleaning things up; but then Katrina arrived. The house got a few trees through the roof and lost a wall, but she was invested in it so was quick to do the repairs.

Vaughn had run into her when hunting apartments at the beginning of the summer. She was renting her renovated garage; he was the first tenant. They had architecture in common—she was doing small jobs for people with old houses along the coast. He'd trained in architecture at Tulane and Yale, in the Goeters years when the idea was, How do we burn down the architecture school this week? Afterward he'd worked in big and none-too-good offices in Atlanta and Dallas, and elsewhere, and had finally more or less retired to the coast of Mississippi to get away from the business. Gail was with him for most of the trek. They had some money saved, and he was going to pick up some work along the coast. Beach houses, he was thinking. That was the idea. It never quite worked out the way he planned.

The courtship with Greta was offhand. They started going to dinner, going to stores together, seeing movies, trading ideas for her ongoing renovation of the house. That put them together a lot of the time. He was glad, too, because most of the time since he and Gail split had been dreary, as though the light was always filtered through tarps.

One night he and Greta had dinner at Sun Deluxe, a tiny Chinese place run by two Vietnamese women, a typical coastal place—a whitewashed repurposed Exxon station with mismatched booths and flat silver ashtrays, the tables covered in strangely textured red plastic, sticky paper napkins, cheap chopsticks, jars of orange sauce on the table, an all-you-can-eat buffet every night, and no customers. They had an especially good time, and when they got back to her house, Greta invited him in and showed him a bedroom she said he could have if he wanted it.

“You could stay here,” she said.

“Here?”

“Inside,” she said. “Not a big thing, just instead of having to go out there all the time, I mean. Unless …”

“No, no,” he said. “I got it. I'm there. Let me get my stuff.”

So he moved into the house, and Greta rented the apartment to a one-handed white guy named Eddie who was a veteran of the first Gulf War and an acquaintance of hers. He told Vaughn he was gay. He was a nasty-looking thing with cartoon hair, stuck up straight as licorice sticks, and a fondness for Hawaiian shirts, of which he seemed to have a good supply. He seemed like trouble, like he could take care of himself and he'd do it at your expense. He stared, unblinking, always looking straight at you, pressure in those eyes. The night he came to see the apartment, Greta came back inside after showing the apartment and said, “He's one of those off-the-books military types they send in for the sterile fatigue stuff.”

“Why rent him the place?”

“Like him,” she said. “He's on our side, you know?”

“Grand,” Vaughn said.

“He's taking you out for beer,” she said.

“When?”

“Now,” she said. “I told him you'd go with.”

They went to a local bar called Hot-2-Trot. It was a place Vaughn and Greta had gone a few times, off the beach near Central Avenue, the leveled main street in Waveland. Eddie wanted a nightcap. “Just one drink,” he said.

He got drunk. When he was drunk he asked Vaughn to kiss him, and Vaughn said, “No. And you'd best be careful, as I am friends with the landlady.”

“Heard that,” Eddie said. “Miss Greta. She's good.”

“You know her?”

“Oh… no, not really. I mean, sorta. I worked some job of hers a couple times, landscape stuff, construction. Hey— c'mon. Give us a little peck on the cheek.”

“I don't kiss people anymore,” Vaughn said, trying to steer clear of any kind of trouble. He figured Eddie was testing him.

Eddie had giant pruney lips. He was a percussionist before he lost the hand.

“Wingy Manone,” Vaughn said, remembering the one-armed trumpet genius from some book his brother, Newton, read when they were kids.

“Shit,” Eddie said, and he frowned, as if Vaughn's saying it was crude and insensitive.

Vaughn started to apologize, and suddenly Eddie leaned over and kissed him. Sloppy, on the lips, his moustache scraping Vaughn's upper lip, Eddie's lips grabbing his like some snap-on tool. There wasn't anything Vaughn could do.

Vaughn figured Eddie was screwing with him, or maybe Eddie
was
gay and wanted to prove it to everybody every minute.

“Gotcha,” Eddie said, smirking, turning back to his Lone Star.

“That's it,” Vaughn said. He wiped his mouth elaborately. “Maybe try brushing next time.”

“Now, if you'd just pecked me, like right here”—Eddie tapped his lips, which looked like a pair of liver-colored shrimp bunk-bedding on the bottom of his face—“if you pecked me like I asked, you'd have been home free.”

Eddie had a fancy one-handed cigarette-lighting trick. He
did it and then looked to Vaughn for approval. “I can do it with no hands, too,” he said. “Like that guy in
Freaks.”

“People been doing that since that movie came out,” Vaughn said. “The forties or something. That guy had
no
arms.”

“Guy was a laundry bundle,” Eddie said. “But I'm bringing the trick back.” He made a big smoke cloud. “They're killing cigarettes here,” he said. “Next month or something. I'll have to go outside.”

“You can deal with it.”

“So what's with you and Greta?” Eddie said. “You moved on up? That the thing?”

“We're friends,” Vaughn said. “We're seeing each other.”