City of Boys (26 page)

It’s just dusk, and the lights on the bridge glitter against the cold water of the river. Teddy whistles quietly as he listens to the game, and when it ends, he turns to another station, listening to that until static erupts and he finds another. As it grows dark, we move away from the city, and from time to time our lights sweep over animals who sit hunched by the side of the road, waiting to cross.

The highway is crowded with trucks, and Teddy passes them all. He rushes up behind an animal carrier, the back of it stuffed with pigs or cows; they are pressed so tight against the metal slats of the truck I can hardly tell what they are, but in the glare of our headlights I see white faces and tiny dark eyes.

—Look, Teddy says. —Steak. Burgers. He glances at me. —I could have been cutting up those very cows next week. Those very cows. He smiles. —Say goodbye to all that.

He turns the radio off, and hums to himself, while I watch his reflection in my window. Every now and then we pass over a bright burst of red on the road, gone so quickly it might be my imagination. I lean my head against the window
and drift in and out of sleep; after a while, Teddy points ahead at a ragged array of lights.

—Look, he says. —That looks like a good place to stop.

He turns to me, his eyes bright red. —I could use some sleep, he says. —How about you?

The motel parking lot is crowded, but Teddy comes back smiling. —We’re in luck, he says. —We got the last room. But they only had a single.

Our room is right next to the motel lounge; the metal plate around the doorknob is dented, but inside the room is cool and there is a large television. Teddy carries in the grocery bag, and sets it on the bureau in front of the mirror. He lifts the bottle of wine out carefully, then begins to pull out food: a box of chocolates, a pineapple, two jars of macadamia nuts. He holds one jar of nuts out to me.

—They were on sale, he says. —All this stuff was on sale.

He stares down into the bag. —Everything was on sale.

—Teddy, look, I say, —cable.

He glances at the television. —Oh, he says. —Yeah.

He looks around the room, at the orange curtains, the orange-and-green bed, all the things he’s pulled from the grocery bag. Through the thin wall I can hear the thump of music and the sound of men and women laughing.

—Maybe we could go to that bar, I say.

He shakes his head. —You’re not old enough, he says.

—You have to be twenty-one.

He pulls the drapes open just as a woman is walking past; she glances in at us without interest; we probably look to her like any other young married couple. As she opens the door to the bar, a surge of noise is let out; it fades as the door closes behind her.

—I don’t know, Teddy says, pulling the drapes closed. —I
don’t know. I’m kind of tired, and I think we have a long way to go.

He lies down on top of the bed, without even removing his shoes; I want to turn on the television and open the box of chocolates Teddy’s brought; I want to go into the lounge and order the kind of drink the women in my magazine would order–a daiquiri or a margarita–and sit at the bar until a handsome man sits beside me; I want to call my mother and Stan. I want to do all of these things, but finally I take off my shoes and lie down on the bed next to Teddy.

He reaches out to turn off the lamp. In the sudden darkness, I can just make out his face in what little light filters in through the drapes.

—Did I tell you about the one with the broken leg? he asks, and closes his eyes.

I can feel music beat against our wall; a few feet away from us, men and women are laughing and dancing and having fun, but while we lie here in the darkness, terrible things are happening everywhere, things we can do nothing about. At this very moment, men without eyes stare at women without faces, and at this very moment, a thousand cows are stumbling toward a thousand men, who lift a thousand hammers. We cannot stop any of it, not even for a moment, and as I listen to Teddy’s sad, shallow breath, I close my eyes and wait once again to be born.

Florence is dreaming she is in the mouth of a shark, caught at her waist; she cannot feel her feet or her legs, only the cold rush of the ocean as the shark pushes her through the glittering water. She can see herself reflected in its flat black eyes as her body comes gently apart.

—Jesus, Louis says, and Florence opens her eyes just as the air conditioner clatters to a stop. Louis is sitting on the end of the bed, in front of the air conditioner; the sheets are pulled down around Florence’s waist and she can feel the last drifts of cool air on her arms and shoulders.

Louis turns toward her and she closes her eyes, waits a moment, then opens them just slightly; through the blur of lashes she can see that he is still turned toward her, watching her closely, but she does not move, and he bends back toward the air conditioner, then rises and goes into the bathroom. She closes her eyes and tries to remember her dream, but she can only see Louis, his large head propped at the end of his long delicate neck, and the lumpy ridges of his spine. When she opens her eyes again, she is startled to see his face a few inches from her own; he smells of soap and toothpaste, and stares at her patiently, waiting for her to wake.

—Florence, he says. —The air conditioner is out. She pulls the sheets up to her neck and closes her eyes.

—Call the guy, okay? he says.

She nods, and he bends to kiss her on the forehead. His dry lips feel papery and hot. Already the heat is rising in him; already his face is covered with a slick skin of sweat.

As he walks through the house, she can hear sand grating under his feet. With the air conditioner off, he has opened the bedroom windows, and the room is beginning to fill with the smell of sulphur from the sprinklers that run all night. All the water here is full of sulphur: ground water, bath water, tap water. Even after it’s boiled, it has a burnt, eggy taste, and it seems impossible to Florence that anything at all could grow in water like that, but what grass there is here is bright green and the flowers are as sturdy as trees. She listens for the sound of Louis’s car over the gravel, and when he is gone, she gets up and closes the windows. She tries
again to remember her dream, but all she can see is Louis, his heavy head and the long bumpy bend of his back.

He has left almost no sign of himself in the kitchen, only lukewarm coffee in the pot. Steam is rising from the coffee, but when she pours herself a cup, it is tepid. She tries to remember why this happens; it’s something Louis explained to her once, —“ambient pressure,” he told her, but even saying the words out loud doesn’t recall to her what they mean. All she can see is the earnest look on his face as he began to explain it. At that moment she had known, somehow, that she would marry him, and the sudden surprising certainty of this forced her to look away. She would be seeing enough of him from then on, she realized, and now, thinking of that moment, she can see perfectly the details of their surroundings–the stained lip of the cream pitcher on their table, the waitress leaning against the counter watching them talk, the crumpled wad of Louis’s napkin-but still she cannot remember why coffee looks hot when it is not.

She empties her cup back into the pot and slits open the blinds over the sink; outside it is another sunny day. She is close enough to Mrs. Walker’s house to see clearly into her kitchen-the bright plastic wrap of a loaf of bread on the counter, a cup and saucer drying in the dish drainer- and when Mrs. Walker comes outside, Florence quickly pulls the blind almost closed. Mrs. Walker turns her head at the motion and stares directly at Florence, but Florence stands still, so that she will seem nothing more than a shadow cast against the window. Mrs. Walker watches a moment, then raises and drops her hand.

She turns, takes the long rake that leans against the wall beside her door, and begins to drag it across the gravel that surrounds her house. Hers is the only house here without any grass at all, only a thin band of dirt that runs right into
the gravel; the other houses have tiny green strips of yard, but all of them float in a sea of white rocks, part of a small group of houses set between a line of shops on one side and a row of hotels right on the ocean. The houses were built before Florida land became so valuable, and they are small and uniformly ugly, little pastel boxes.

Except for Florence and Louis, the people who live here are old, and though they have all been offered plenty of money for their houses, most of them have lived here too long to imagine life under any other circumstances; they will live here until they die, and then their children will sell the small plots of land to developers, who will periodically cruise by in their black cars, waiting impatiently for the rest of the land to become available. One by one the tiny pink-and-white houses will turn up empty, and those who still live there watch the other houses anxiously for signs of vacancy; the smallest of things–a shade not drawn at night, a morning paper not collected–drive them deeper into their walls, the borders of their world shrinking daily.

Although Florence has seen the other residents shuffling across the gravel between their houses and the street, Mrs. Walker is the only person she has met in her few months here. Every morning Mrs. Walker rakes her gravel, which is always smooth and white and even; then she sits all day in a rocking chair in the sun, her chair driving deep ruts into the gravel she has raked, her skin as dark as the strip of dirt around her house.

After she has breakfast, Florence does what she does every day: she listens to the radio, then washes the clothes Louis wore the day before; he sweats so much here, he says, that if his clothes aren’t washed right away, they’ll be stained and ruined. The radio station she tunes in is all news, all day, and offers, as part of its programming, weather reports
every fifteen minutes. It is always warm and sunny. She listens now to a story about a lost child who wandered off near the Everglades and is feared dead, killed perhaps by alligators. There was something, she remembers vaguely, that she was supposed to do today, something Louis wanted, but as she pours bright blue laundry soap over his yellow shirt, all she can think of is the child wandering around and around in the gloomy jungle.

By the time she comes outside, the sun has passed over her house, and Mrs. Walker patiently watches her hang up her laundry. Their gravel lawns run right into each other, but Mrs. Walker seems to have a clear idea of the line of demarcation, and she observes it carefully, raking right up to it, then situating her chair just on the border, across from the small clothesline Louis has strung up. When Florence finishes, she will sit down, and Mrs. Walker will begin to complain about her dead husband’s children, who, she tells Florence, are only waiting for her to die, so that they can sell her house.

—They’re monsters, she says, crossing herself, —evil monsters. This always brings a smile to her face. —They’ll pay, she says, nodding. —You just wait.

What
she
is waiting for, she has explained to Florence, is the Rapture, which, as Florence understands it, is a kind of final judgment, a day on which, according to Mrs. Walker, the true faces of all the believers will be revealed, and all the sinners cast into eternal torment. Mrs. Walker was raised a Catholic, but she has incorporated the Rapture into her own personal cosmology because, she says, it makes more sense; this is consistent with what Florence understands about Mrs. Walker, since the Rapture seems to be a faith based wholly on the concept of revenge: not an insult, not a slight, not a single moment of the pain that has been dealt her will go unanswered, and it is clear to Florence that
Mrs. Walker can hardly wait for it to happen. Florence supposes that part of the reward for the believers will be to hang around on earth long enough to actually see the misery inflicted upon their enemies–that seems to be in large part the source of Mrs. Walker’s enthusiasm, and Florence knows she keeps a list of transgressions in her head. Florence wonders if she herself has yet committed any.

When Florence finishes hanging her laundry, she sits down in her plastic lawn chair, next to Mrs. Walker but securely set in the gravel that belongs to Louis and Florence. Mrs. Walker leans forward across the boundary line and removes her hat.

—Did I tell you? she says. —They bought me a coffin.

She bends to flick a bug from her leg. —A cheap one, she says with satisfaction. —The cheapest.

Florence wonders how she learned this, but she shakes her head and looks out past Mrs. Walker. From here, she can see the main street that runs past their development, just on the other side of Mrs. Walker’s house, to the beach. Her own house is set farther back from the street, and from her windows all she can see are the backs and sides of houses, and from the front, a few ratty palms that grow up along the alley. Right now she watches a small family on their way to the beach. A woman is struggling to keep up with one child, who runs ahead of her, without losing the other, who lags behind. Later, they will all drag themselves back to their hotel, trailing towels and buckets and toys, exhausted from their day in the sun. Florence sees the woman gazing in at them between the houses; and Florence knows she must envy them their lives, sitting out here in the sun all day, all year, with nothing to do but let their skin turn dark. —Oh, her mother had said when Florence was packing to move, —you’ll have the most beautiful tan.

And it’s true–everyone here is the color of copper, but when
they come close, the skin on their faces is thick and ropy; Florence’s own skin remains puffy and pale–when she goes out, she wears a hat and long sleeves to protect herself from the sun. She has yet to adjust to the climate here; the heat and sun seem to have stunned both her and Louis into a daze, and they spend most of their time inside; during the day, they watch the sun beat through the windows, and at night they close their door against the steamy hiss of the sprinklers.

This is not the life Florence imagined for herself as she sat at the window of her parents’ house in Indiana, looking all around her at the wide brown landscape. What she had planned to live like and look like and be like had nothing to do with that world, and when, one night, Louis’s aunt awoke and died, leaving her house and everything in it to Louis, Florence saw it as a kind of deliverance. Louis’s aunt had been old; she was ready to die, Florence was sure. When she had met her, several years before, her skin was transparent with age, and she was interested in nothing except Louis, who, she told Florence, had always been her favorite.