Beautiful Kate (20 page)

Late the next morning, I woke to find a trio of mangy dogs sniffing at me and licking my feet and hands. I jumped up, scattering them, and hurriedly dressed and left the alley. On the street, people stared openly at me and wagged their heads, and when I got back to my room and looked into the mirror, I learned why: my cheek was swollen and there was dried blood below my nose and on my jaw. Every bone and muscle in my body ached and I could not tell how much of the pain was due to the beating and how much to my hangover, which was prodigious. I checked my pockets and shoes and found the money gone, all of it. Not knowing what else to do, I washed the dried blood off my face and crawled into bed, grateful that the room was paid for until noon of the next day. I dozed off now and then and got up only to drink water and to use the bathroom down the hall. And by early evening I fell asleep again and slept all that night, hardly dreaming at all.

The following morning I went to the diner where I had eaten most of my meals since hitting town and I explained to the owner-cook that I had been mugged and that I was broke and would be willing to wash dishes in I exchange for food. In answer, he brought me a glass of milk and two aging breakfast rolls, which he said I could pay for later, after I found a job.

I went back to the hotel and checked out, carrying my duffelbag with me as I looked for work, anything to see me through the next few days. As hungry and beaten-down as I felt, I was tempted to walk over to one of the bridges and hitch a ride home. But the thought of arriving there and limping up onto that wide front porch with Jason contentedly taking in my swollen face and whipped spirit—that, I felt, would have been too steep a price to pay. So I kept looking and finally talked a jolly old cement-block maker named Donato into letting me help unload a freight car of bagged cement that had just come in. A young deaf-mute was already on the job and Donato said that my pay would be the same as his: one dollar an hour (“but fer
woik
, not coffee-breakin’”) and that if the two of us got the load off by the end of the next day we would each get a bonus of four dollars.

The job was simple enough. All the deaf-mute and I had to do was pick up the hundred-pound sacks one at a time and carry them to the freight car door and then down a ramp to the ground, where we stacked them on skids, which Donato himself would then pick up with his forklift truck and transfer into the kiln yard. It was simple, much as torture is simple. The temperature inside the car had to be over one hundred degrees and the cement dust made the air all but unbreathable. And the huge freight car held close to fifteen hundred sacks, which meant that the deaf-mute and I each had to heft and carry almost ninety thousand pounds over the two days.

But we did it. I slept there in the kiln yard at night, and I ate at the diner (
after
paying for the milk and buns I owed for). And when the job was finished I continued to sleep out-of-doors for the next two nights, wandering the waterfront through much of the day, doing nothing and drinking nothing, lost in a useless debate with myself. Hour after hour I went over the thing in my mind, what had happened between me and the black woman who called herself “Mama.” I still found it incredible that I’d had sex with her, and not just once but
repeatedly
. For in my eighteen-year-old mind, she was as sexually alien as a female could get, being fat and middle-aged and of another race. And yet the fact remained that I had responded to her. I had gone along with her. I even had initiated some of the things we did. I kept seeing myself there with her in bed, red-lit by Budweiser, accepting the smell of the place, the children, the whole squalid ghetto scene. And I began to tell myself that it was all only natural, no more or less than a man obeying his instincts. Reason had not entered in. I had made no choices. I simply had let go, much like letting go of the jetty railing and dropping into the great brown surge of the river. A man could protest and flap his arms or he could screw on a look of noble determination and pretend to the whole wide world that he was swimming, when in fact all he was doing was going with the flow, the irresistible flow of the river, like any other flotsam. And I told myself that if this was true for me and the black woman, then was it not also true—a thousand times truer—for me and Kate? Had I ever really had any choice in what we did? Was I actually at fault? Or was it that the decisions all had been made for me, back at the sources of rivers, in the springs of time?

It was a comforting line of thought and I gave it a good play during those last few days I spent in the city, waiting for my swollen cheek to go down and for the soreness to work its way out of my body. But in truth it was an idea that prospered only in daylight. At night, as my dreams kicked up again and had me lying awake under the stars for hours, I found myself wondering if my experience with Mama could ever be construed as anything except a bizarre and degenerate rutting in the filth, proving only that I was out of control, a sexual outlaw with no more concern for myself than I’d had for my sister. And as for achieving any sexual independence from Kate, had I really managed such a feat in Mama’s bed, or was it that in accepting her black and alien embrace I had managed only to brand myself more than ever my twin’s slave?

Lying awake in an alley, I grudgingly gave up on the Great Debate. Whatever the truth was, it would make no difference in the end—that much I was sure of anyway. Above me, I could see a patch of night sky and I could smell the river a few blocks away, flowing on, just as it always had flowed. And I realized suddenly that I would be heading home when it was light, if for no other reason than that I had to see Kate again, had to be there with her when it all finally came out, as it inevitably would. And then—that was the part I didn’t know. Not then anyway.

9

When we went to bed last night the rain already had begun, a cold steady drizzle that even then was starting to freeze onto the power lines and the trees. So on rising this morning I was not surprised to find a somewhat seedy version of a Hallmark Christmas card outside my window: the sun glinting coldly off a world immured in ice. Down the street a spindly hickory tree had fallen across a power line and I could see, like a string of exploding ladyfingers, a steady electric discharge onto the ice-covered pavement below. The trees still standing had the look of crystal willows and I did not doubt that a number of them might also take the plunge.

There was not much I could do about it, however, so I padded back to bed and kissed Toni on the ear in the hope of waking her and having some company, but all she did was sigh and pull the covers more tightly around her, which left me with no choice except to go into the bathroom and shave as noisily as I could. I was just finishing when I heard a sharp, cracking sound, followed by the splintering racket of the front porch and the front wall of the house giving way. Toni incredibly went right on sleeping, even as I yelled at her on my way into Jason’s room, where I found the old man propped up in bed, his eyes afire with indignation more than shock as he stared out at me from behind a maze of ice-covered oak branches. Beyond him, through a yawning hole in the wall, I saw blue sky where our one surviving oak so recently had stood.

“Get me out of here!” he croaked.

Junior was in the room now too and he pushed back some of the branches while I coaxed Jason free and got him onto his feet. I walked him into Sarah’s room and helped him into her bed.

“My home!” he complained. “Even that! They won’t even leave me that.”

I told him that it was only
part
of the front of the house that had been hit and that it could be repaired, could be made to look like new again, but he was not listening.

“My home!” he said again. “Even that!”

I went back to his room and helped Junior pull the bed away from the tree’s invading branches, which were already beginning to rain melting ice onto the furniture and the floor.

“This is all we needed,” Jason grumbled.

“Better get in a call to your insurance agent,” I told him, only to get a sour laugh in response.

“
What
insurance?”

He had started down the stairs by then and I followed him into the living room, where we found the main part of the tree-trunk braced at one end on the old upright piano and running across the room, down and out through the shattered wall to the point of the break. There a single white spire of oak still stood, as though to mark the spot of the killing. Inside the living room a small forest of ice-coated branches scraped at what was left of the ceiling—and the floor of Jason’s bedroom.

“Jesus,” Junior said, “the old bastard almost bought it.”

“Yeah, he was lucky.”

“Wasn’t he, though.”

“Getting back—what were you saying about insurance?”

He made a face. “Just that we ain’t got any, that’s all. In an area like this, they really sock it to you. So Jason canceled.”

“Beautiful.”

“Yeah, ain’t it. Especially with the Congo Lords around.”

“I get the picture,” I said. “But what about this mess? You got a chainsaw?”

That made him laugh. “Oh sure. There’s so much for me to cut up around here.”

“Then we’ll have to buy one.”

“And after you cut up the tree, what happens then? Do we rebuild the front of the house? You a carpenter now, as well as a has-been screenwriter?”

“We could board it up anyway. With plywood and two-by-fours.”

He was smiling wearily. “I take it you haven’t been to a lumberyard lately. You got any idea what plywood costs?”

I asked him what alternatives we had.

“Just close the rooms off. Take what we want out of here and Jason’s bedroom, and close them off. It’s just a lot of space. Who needs it?”

“Jason, for one. I don’t think he’ll like being in Sarah’s room.”

“Then that’s kind of his problem, isn’t it?”

Hugging herself for warmth, Toni had just come down from upstairs.

“Your old man’s crying,” she told us. “He wants both of you.”

“Yeah,” Junior said. “
Now
he does.”

As I turned to go, Toni ran her hand through the branches above her head. She pulled an icicle and touched it to her tongue.

“You know, I didn’t even hear the damn thing fall,” she said. “I must’ve been dreaming of the beach.”

In the hours that followed I learned more about Jason and Junior’s finances than I had in all the weeks since my return. As I expected, Jason insisted that he could not stay in any room except his own and that both it and the living room would have to be repaired immediately.

“We’re not animals,” he proclaimed. “We don’t live in the out-of-doors.”

Junior patiently heard him out and said, fine, he would do just what Jason wanted, all he needed was money—a statement that immediately had the old man shaking with frustration. And only slowly did it come out that Jason’s checking and savings accounts at the bank were empty. The checks he had written two weeks before to pay utility bills had cleaned him out, he admitted. There was only nine dollars left in the account.

“So it’s up to you now,” he said to Junior. “All the money I’ve been paying you all these years to stay on here—it’s time you spent some of it. With Sarah gone, it’s all we’ve got.”

Junior’s reaction to this was, first, to punch the wall upon learning that the kitty was empty and that he would no longer be getting his monthly check, and second, to have a short sour laugh at the idea of his paying for any repairs on the house.

“I’d like to know how the hell I’m supposed to have saved any money on the princely salary of two hundred bucks a month,” he said. “These days, that’s about enough for cigarettes and beer. But of course you wouldn’t know that, holed up here in this house like some kind of mole all these years.”

Jason had begun to cough and wheeze. “That’s enough!” he got out.

“Not hardly, old man. You should also know that even if I had the bread, none of it would go into this place—unless of course you want to put my name right up there with Sarah’s in your goddamn will!”

“You got the allowance!” the old man thundered. “Sarah gets the farm!”

Junior looked at me for commiseration. “Listen to that, will you?
Allowance
, he calls it. And this place is a
farm
. All three acres of it.”

He dismissed the matter with a contemptuous wave of his hand and went back downstairs, where I heard him and Toni begin to move some of the furniture out of the living room. Meanwhile I tried as best I could to comfort the old man, which is not saying much, I realize. But he responded well enough and in time I even got him to discuss his finances more calmly, in the hope that we could turn up something somewhere. And sure enough, there it was, just within reach of his senescent memory now that I was prodding him—a safe deposit box. It had been a couple of years since he’d even checked the thing, he said, and though he couldn’t be sure of this, he vaguely remembered keeping something in it besides his legal papers.

“It could be cash,” he went on. “Yes, I think there could be some cash there. I’ve been worried about the banks for years, you know. That they’d fail. I didn’t want everything in my savings account.”