1985 - Stars and bars (14 page)

Thank you, Mam,’ Henderson said. ‘Our 1’il ol’ secret. Have a good day now.’

He walked off, rather impressed with his grasp of vernacular. Still, now at least the outside world would be able to make contact. One step in the right direction.

It seemed surprisingly hot for April and during the trudge into town along the featureless lane he was obliged to remove first his tie and then his jacket. A mile or so up the road, Freeborn roared dustily past him in his big car, one hand high out of the window, his middle finger spearing the air. Henderson, checking instinctively that there were no witnesses, gave him a V-sign back. It all seemed a bit feeble and adolescent, but, as with Bryant, he found it no problem descending to Freeborn’s level.

Sweaty and not a little footsore he arrived some fifteen minutes later at the main street of Luxora Beach. In front of him was the railway line and beyond that the road. To his left was the shopping mall. The neon of the bar signs still burned palely in the afternoon air. The town was very quiet—in fact he could see no-one on the streets at all. Above the main street, strung on a wire cable, a set of traffic lights blinked redundantly. There were no cars to stop.

He crossed the railway and headed towards the wooden spire of the Baptist church. Down these side roads were small businesses and stores: Luxora Beach auto accessory, Luxora Beach agricultural wholesalers, electrical goods, Dr Tire, Luxora Beach Fertilizers—Herbert Hackett Last Jnr prop. ‘Real Manure’—Luxora Beach grain and seed merchants.

At the post office—not far from the church—a wooden building flying the Stars and Stripes, and below it the Stars and Bars, he posted his letter (express) to Irene. He noted the glass boothed public telephone outside it and wondered if he should try and call her again, but on reflection decided to let the letter do its work first.

He walked back to main street, business over. What an effort, he thought, just to post a letter. The afternoon sun was still beating down fiercely and there was still little sign of life. He stood in some shade on the raised wooden sidewalk and looked up and down the dusty road. Where am I? he thought. What am I doing in this place? He longed for a car or a lorry to drive through town. On the door of the shop next to him was a notice: ‘Closed Sunday. See you in church.’

He thought suddenly—illogically—of his father.

Perhaps it was because he felt as strange and out of place here as his father must have at times in the foetid jungles of Burma. From placid drizzling Hove to hot dangerous Burma…Henderson looked about him. He tried to imagine Arnold Dores standing beside him now. The thin man in his baggy trousers, his short oiled hair, his neat moustache. What would he say? What advice would he offer? Would he smile, and expose the unfortunate gap between his front teeth? ‘Now look, son, if I were you, I’d—‘ What? He exhaled. The fragile chimera of Arnold Dores disappeared.

A large maroon car started up in the parking lot in front of the mall. It drove slowly along before turning to bump across the railway tracks and wheel onto the main road. He saw that there were two girls in the front seat with blonde hair like Shanda’s and a lot of make·up;. They cruised leisurely past him, staring at him with candid curiosity. They wore scant T·shirt tops, tight across their breasts. The car was battered and filthy. Old cigarette packs, magazines and handbooks were piled in a loose drift between the dashboard top andthe windscreen. The car moved on slowly down the road; it seemed to trail a frisson of sexuality, like smoke—of the most tawdry and flashy sort, he conceded, but impressively potent for all that. Somewhere there was a life in Luxora Beach.

Intrigued, and smiling to himself he crossed the road. There is a look, he thought, watching the car disappear from sight, that is common to a huge proportion of American girls. It ran the gamut from Shanda to millionaires’ daughters. First there was the mane of hair or an attempt at a mane—blonde preferably, but not essential. Then there is a
lot
of mascara and all the rest: blusher, eye-shadow and lipstick (usually pink). And then something must glint or glisten on the head—earrings most commonly, but a necklace or hairslide would do. He added some more details to the archetype—pushed-up breasts, white strappy high-heeled shoes’—as he headed for the Gage mansion road. Then he saw Beckman’s pickup parked in front of the bar with Bryant sitting alone in the front seat. He changed course.

‘Have a nice day?’ he asked caustically.

‘Oh hi. Yeah, it wasn’t bad. He’s not so weird as I thought. He’s weird, but not that weird.’

‘In future do you think you could possibly let me know when you’re going on an outing?’

‘I was just keeping out of the way. I thought you’d be pleased.’ She picked at the material on her trousers. ‘Seen the paintings?’

‘No. Gage has been away.’

‘Beckman says they’re already sold.’

‘Well he’s wrong,’ he said impatiently. ‘Where is he anyway?’

‘In the bar.’

‘Right. I’ll ask him.’

Henderson paused at the door, second thoughts crowding in on him. Then he pushed through the door.

For four o’clock in the afternoon the bar was astonishingly busy (so this was where everybody was)—and very dark. There must have been two dozen men in the long, thin room. As his eyes grew accustomed to the murky atmosphere he saw that they were all white, all wearing work clothes, and all more or less drunk. Tentatively, he approached the bar. In addition to purveying alcohol it also sold, he noticed, handkerchiefs, a range of pens and combs. All the fitments and plastic advertisements for beer were decades old.

‘What’ll it be?’ the pasty-faced, oily-haired barman asked him. No Southern courtesies here.

‘I’m looking for Beckman Gage.’

‘BECKMAN!’ the barman shouted down to the end of the room. There, Henderson saw an ancient mechanical skittle machine and Beckman bent over it.

Beckman gave up his game and wandered over, beer bottle in hand. He wore similar clothes to the men in the bar—denim and a checked cotton shirt. Odd garb for a laboratory, Henderson thought, but then again, he probably swabbed the floors.

‘Hi,’ Beckman said. ‘Beer?’

‘Please.’

Beckman’s longish, straw-coloured hair gave him an initial appearance of youthfulness, but when his face was scrutinized its lines and wrinkles were more apparent. Henderson guessed he was in his mid-thirties—far too old for Bryant, he reassured himself.

A long-necked beer bottle was banged down on the bar and its top flipped off with an opener.

‘Could I have a glass, please?’ Henderson said without thinking. The barman looked at him with heavy suspicion—as if he’d just asked for the ladies’ room—before raking around on some shelves beneath the bar and presenting him with a thick, finely scratched and semi-transparent glass.

‘Cheers,’ Henderson said. Beckman smiled, his eyelids fluttering like an ingenue’s. He seemed to blink about two times a second, Henderson calculated: it must be like seeing the world lit by a stroboscopic sun. To his alarm he sensed his own blink-rate going up in sympathy.

‘Thanks for taking Bryant to your, ah, lab.’

‘Hey, a pleasure. Nice kid. Sure talks a lot.’ Blink-blink-blink-blink.

Pause.

‘She’s my step-daughter. Or soon will be.’

‘I know. Congratulations.’ Bat-bat-bat-bat.

Henderson turned away and forcibly held his own fluttering eyelids steady with thumb and forefinger. Making eye-contact with Beckman was instant conjunctivitis. He addressed the beer in his glass.

‘What is it exactly that you do at your lab?’

‘Well, I’m what’s known as an elementary particle physicist. You know, quarks, neutrinos, anti-matter—that sort of thing.’

‘An elementary particle physicist?’ Henderson strained to keep the laughing incredulity out of his voice. The poor guy. ‘Fascinating.’

‘I think so.’

There was another pause. Then Beckman said, ‘Listen, please don’t worry about my blinking. It happened in Nam. I nearly got blown away.’

‘Really? I hadn’t actually noticed…I thought…’ Henderson changed the subject. ‘Bryant said something about the paintings—your father’s paintings—already being sold.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. Some months ago. Freeborn sold them.’

Henderson felt a twinge of alarm. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I guess so.’

‘There must be some mistake.’

‘You tell me.’

‘Who did he sell them to?’

‘Some guy called Sereno. I don’t know. Maybe you’d better ask Freeborn.’

I’d better ask old man Gage, Henderson thought, I’m sure he’ll be fascinated.

‘Can I hitch a ride back to the house?’

‘Surely. Let’s go.’

They went outside and got into the pickup, Bryant sitting between them. She had put on sunglasses—maybe to hide her blinks, Henderson thought. She seemed very at ease and unconcerned.

They bumped off down the track.

‘When I was in Nam,’ Beckman began, unprompted, ‘68, Dac Tro province. No, it was Quang Tri. They called an airstrike on this hostile ville. ‘Cept the fuckin’ airforce dropped the bombs right on our fuckin’ platoon. Three dead, six injured. I woke up two days later in a hospital, not a scratch, but just blinking like shit. Haven’t stopped since.’

‘God,’ Bryant said in awe. ‘You’ve been blinking like this all these years?’

‘You got it.’

‘Didn’t you get any compensation? Some sort of pension?’ Henderson asked politely.

‘For what? I told you, I didn’t have a scratch. I didn’t even get a fuckin’ purple heart. They sent me right back in.’

‘Good God,’ Henderson said, ‘that’s barbaric.’

‘But at least you weren’t dead,’ Bryant said. ‘Like the other guys.’

‘Yeah. That’s something, I suppose.’

They arrived at the house. Alma-May was sweeping the porch.

‘Evening,’ Henderson said. ‘Mr Gage back?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, good.’

‘But he’s gone away again. He was looking for you. For to show you the paintings, he said.’

‘Bloody
hell…
Excuse me.’ Henderson looked around him exasperatedly. ‘Did he leave any message about the paintings?’

‘No.’ Alma-May swept dust over his shoes. He moved aside.

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’

‘No.’

That evening, Henderson and Bryant watched TV after being served something called ‘turnip cakes’ and a watery ratatouille. Beckman disappeared into his room. From upstairs came the remorseless bass thump of Duane’s rock music. Henderson got a bad headache at about half past nine. He went out into the warm night, stood on the porch and stared at the yellow windows of Freeborn’s mobile home. He found no answer there and so went up to bed.

‘Y
eah, we was on patrol near Loc Tri. No, no, it was Dhat Pho. Man, we was pissed. A real jerk-off patrol. Then we sees this like buffalo thing—kinda like a big cow? You know?—in a paddy field. That’s where the gooks grow their rice.’

‘In a paddy field? I see.’

‘Yeah. Well, I guess it was about, oh, a hundred and fifty yards away. No, let’s see, maybe a hundred and thirty.’ Beckman Gage, elementary particle physicist, frowned as he tried to recall the exact distance. ‘Let’s say one-forty. Anyway, so the sergeant says, ‘The first guy to off that buffalo gets a six-pack on me.’ Yeah. Well, I was like carrying the machine gun. The other guys start firing…’

Henderson felt himself nodding off. He’d had a good forty-five minutes of campaign anecdotes since lunch-time.

‘…and I laid ten rounds of tracer up its ass. It just sorta disintegrated. Like pink foam!’ Beckman gave a dry chuckle and shook his head over the folly of his youthful days.

Henderson looked at his watch. He hadn’t left the house all day in case he missed Gage, but the man hadn’t returned. Bryant had gone shopping with Shanda in Hamburg, which turned out to be five or six miles away. He had been crunching his way through one of Alma-May’s special salads—hard boiled eggs, raw potatoes, squash and some tough purple leaf-when Beckman had arrived from his lab.

‘It was kinda like the time we was doing hearts and minds in Tro Nang. No Doc Tri—’

Freeborn came in. Henderson never thought he’d be even a tiny bit glad to see him, but he was. All the same he gripped the edge of the kitchen table defensively. However, Freeborn seemed to have forgotten about his deadline and ignored him.

‘Beckman, can I have a word? Outside.’ He looked darkly at Henderson. He and Beckman went out into the hall.

Henderson heard Freeborn bellow, ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ at Duane. Then about two minutes later he returned alone.

‘Listen, you English dick, the only reason I ain’t breaking your balls is that I love my father.’

Henderson couldn’t follow the logic of this argument.

‘I give you one final warning,’ he went on. ‘If you so much as mention the name Sereno to my father you’re a dead man.’

‘Look, I just want to do my job and get out of this…out of here,’ Henderson insisted. ‘You and your father can sort out your own problems. I’ve got no axe to grind.’

Freeborn hitched his tight jeans up, and pointed at him.

‘I’m going away for two days. If you’re still here when I get back then you get your ass waxed. Got it?’

‘Don’t worry. I shall be long gone.’ Perhaps it was the anaesthetic quality of Beckman’s battlefield yarns but Freeborn’s threats didn’t seem to perturb him that much today.

They looked at each other for a while. Why does this man dislike me so much? he wondered. What little scheme of his has my arrival foiled?

Alma-May interrupted their stare.

‘Get out of my kitchen,’ she ordered grumpily. ‘I got to make you all dinner, your Daddy says.’

‘What dinner?’ Freeborn asked.

‘He’s having a big dinner for Mr Dose here. He’s invited the preacher and his wife.’

T.J. Cardew?
Shit
. And Mrs Cardew? Aw
no
.’

‘That’s the only preacher we got. And y’all got to be there, your Daddy says.’

Dinner was to be served at seven thirty. Guests were to foregather in the sitting room downstairs from seven onwards. Henderson bathed and put on his last clean shirt. He had only brought three, not anticipating his stay to be so protracted. He knotted his tie and combed his hair. As an afterthought he ran his comb through his densening eyebrows. He’d have to get them cut back soon, like a hedge. It had been one of the most boring days of his life, waiting vainly for Gage to show up. Bryant and Shanda had returned from Hamburg at 4.00. When Henderson asked her how she got along with Shanda she had said it had been ‘fun’.