Eating Memories (26 page)

Iona took a deep breath and turned away from her distracted contemplation of the wall. Across the pale room Froggy stood, looking out a pair of French doors.

“It’s stopped raining,” he said.

She put her hand to the center of her chest, feeling the absence of some forgotten hurt.

“Please,” Froggy urged. “Won’t you come and see the gardens?”

As she came forward he took her arm. She glanced down at the gloved hand, the cuffed sleeve.

“That won’t be necessary,” she told him.

“As you wish,” he replied. The hand on her arm elongated, the pallor of the gloves changing to rough brown-gray skin.

He opened the door and they walked out. In the Garden of Perpetual Happiness droplets leaked from the moist leaves. A breeze caught the wind chimes and set them to tinkling.

“Your mind is rich,” he said. “There is so much wonder to choose from. You must be diligent to tell me which of your thoughts makes you most cheerful so I do not pick merely those that interest me.”

Together they strode out down the damp promenade. A peacock hooted in the darkness beyond the chrysanthemums.

As they neared the crest of the bridge Froggy stiffened, his hand tightening on her arm. Noting his discomfort, she paused to look down and caught a glimpse of something floating just under the surface of the water, Terror ignited, a lump of coal in her chest. It spread its conflagration down her stomach, her trembling limbs. Suddenly it was difficult to breathe.

“Look away,” he told her, his tone gentle.

Quickly she shunted her distressed gaze to the side and the masses of golden flowers.

“It’s best that you don’t look down.”

But her horrified mind gave her no other choice. In a moment she looked again. The thing under the water was clearer now, as though it were rising from a depth, all lacy petticoat, jellyfish billows, and tangled blond seaweed. Slowly, inexorably, as though caught in the current, the thing in the water began to turn.

“There is no sense in recalling that,” he said, and steered her from the edge.

In desperation, she stared upwards into the whirled, porcelain arc of the sky so that her gaze would not fall to the water and its terrifying puzzle. She knew there was something she should remember, but the close heavens made her forget.

“Does it please you?” Froggy asked, bending to her, his voice hushed and timid and oh, so wise.

“Yes,” she whispered, grasping his long, nubbly fingers. “It does.”

All beings were ultimately alien to each other; all creatures lived isolated in their minds’ small rooms. But, even so, one could reach out at times.

The glad truth was that even snails touched.

Author’s Note:
T
his story and “Blue Woofers” figured prominently in my first novel, but while “Blue Woofers” was used nearly verbatim, Cold Allies relates what might have happened after this short story ended. You got to figure—don’t you?—that this boy’s final trip with his Pa, although his best choice for survival, was destined for no good ending.

When he was drunk enough, Pa would get a wistful grin on his face and tell me about the time Texas used to be the biggest state, like goddamned ugly acreage was something to be proud of.

When things change, some parts of it hurt and some just get funny. Houston and Galveston they tried to save, Pa tells me. Pa, said all the people at the new capital in Dallas never seen the point. And when the state legislature finally just up and told everybody flat-out that they couldn’t afford to fund the dikes, all the people in the rest of Texas just grinned and let the crabs have Houston. What with the stink from the refineries and the bad traffic, they all thought the world would be a better place without it.

But losing Corpus had been hard for Pa. When he was on his second six-pack, he’d tell me about eating fried shrimp at some fancy white-tableclothed restaurant where big glass windows looked over the bridge and the bay. Then he’d start to cry. He’d cry for Corpus, and he’d cry for the white-tailed deer, and the red oaks. Pa could get sentimental like that.

Me, I never seen when the oak trees died. All I ever seen was their ghosts standing dead in the pastures. But God, I loved documentaries about the Change. I seen that news special on the TV, showing how the Antarctic ice-cap broke into big, glistening pieces that floated off around the sea, like fruit cocktail bobbing in Jell-O.

I seen a neat documentary, too, that counted up the deaths in the U.S.: Eighteen million from starvation, and twenty million from the spotted fever that arrived later, like a horseman of the Apocalypse with a lame mount.

What happened in Llano was pretty quiet. The spotted death didn’t hit the hill country, and, being farmers, we weren’t going to starve overnight. By the time I hit twelve, though, being a little hungry was just part of life and I never got to see no more documentaries. The Llano River dried up, and then the Colorado became a trickle, and people started emptying out of Llano like piss out of a steer. It just wasn’t worth the trouble for the electric company to maintain the wires.

The Colorado River and the electric company both went away, and left Llano to the scorpions. As soon as the dry started settling in, them black Mexican scorpions, some as big as a spread hand, started hoofing north. From the time I started to toddle to the age of eight, I got stung twice. The second time nearly killed me, which is what taught me not to go outside without my boots on and not to lay on the floor while I was reading.

I never was a fast learner.

If you was to ask me what I thought of the weather changes, I’d tell you, scorpions, creosote brush, arid goddamned longhorn cattle. Everybody else thought about how damned hot it was. When I was growing up, though, it just seemed natural for everybody to lay down in the middle of the day in the summer and not get up until about five o’clock. When I was a kid; I didn’t think much about the heat.

It was the fucking loneliness that got me.

The only people who stayed around Llano were T.J. Garza, who raised ostriches, and Pa, who was working on a crossbred cow that would mix the stick-to-itiveness of the longhorn with the eatability of the Angus.

But that bull Angus never bred true, and when them longhorn cows would throw their calves, they’d be white-and-brown spotted, with nubbly horns already pushing out of each side of their slick heads so fast you’d know they’d end up with
a arm’s span each side.

The Angus bull was a terror, and he looked like a black box of meat with legs. Summers I had to wet him down so that he wouldn’t go to fainting, like he had a habit of doing. Pa told me once that the Angus come originally from Scotland, and sometimes I’d think that was what made him so goddamned mean. His blood was longing for them misty, cold mornings. Maybe he’d dream about them or something, and then when he’d wake up and find himself in Llano, he’d be pissed off for a week.

But them longhoms . . . wasn’t nothing could bother them. At breeding time, we’d bring them in, all scruffy and lean, full of piss and vinegar and blowflies and burrs. We’d wet down the Angus good and then lead him out like he was goddamned King of Scotland. Pa’d let him mount the cows in the coral, so His Majesty wouldn’t have to put up with the predators, and I’d spray him down like a male dog on a bitch so he wouldn’t have to worry about the heat. Then, when the longhorn cows took, we’d just let them loose out in the back forty to fend for themselves, and lead that old Angus back to his stall.

Every once in a while, we’d throw out a bale of hay or two and watch them cows come up with their new, scraggly calves, every one of them a longhorn, just like that Angus had never had no part in the breeding. I used to think that it was the desert who was their true Pa, and that as long as them cows had to forage for scrub, them calves would look stringy and hard, like they belonged to the place.

Everything soft just moved out of Texas, and when I was almost fifteen, I recall going over to T.J.’s for an ostrich-egg omelet and seeing an old
Playboy
magazine he had on the night stand. It wasn’t like I passed up peeking at all them women with their privates spread. I looked at them, too. But what caught me was a picture of a woman standing in a glade greener than anything I’d ever seen. She had a dress on with the first three buttons undone, but nothing really showing. That dress was a material soft as smoke, and it was the color of the thunderheads that roll over from the ocean on their ways to somewheres else. Her hair was like the sun just before it dips out of sight in the west and pulls cool night up like a coverlet. God, she was beautiful!

When the two men seen me looking at the magazine, they laughed.

“Sap’s rising in the boy, Duane,” TJ. said. “Need to take him over to the San Saba whorehouse.”

And Pa said, with a drunk’s sloppy grin, “Seen anything in there you’d like to grab hold of, boy?”

Fact was, I had. I wanted to grab onto that girl in the green glade and let her take me away to someplace where the rain comes down quiet and slow, someplace empty of scorpions, a place where oak trees go to leaf.

Pa was still ribbing me when we left TJ.’s.

“I want to leave this goddamned place,” I said. It was the first time I’d really known what I wanted, and maybe that’s what growing up means.

“Where you want to go?” he asked me. I was pure astonished that he didn’t sound mad. He sounded sort of thoughtful, actually. Maybe the thoughtfulness came from his being drunk and trying to keep the pickup on the road. “Down to Victoria and the coast?”

“I want to get the hell out of Texas. Want to go up north, where they have winters with snow and maybe some pine trees.”

“Shoot, boy,” he said in disgust, “they’s
Yankees
up north.” He sort of whipped his hand to the side and thumped my chest. He was joking, but the blow hurt. Pa was always hurting me and not meaning to, when he was drunk.

“Up to Michigan, it’s still green,” I told him, “and the summers don’t come on like blowflies on shit. There ain’t no goddamned black scorpions up to Michigan.”

He looked at me, taking his eyes off the road for a second or so too long for comfort. The light from the dash lit his pockmarked face in green, making little moon craters of the places where the doctors had burned the cancers off. I knew he was mad then, and I knew he was scared, too, because Ma had gone off just after I was born, the same way I wanted to.

“Don’t you go on about how the north’s so great and about how Llano ain’t no good, You never starved here. The spotted fever never come.”

“’Spotted fever never come,” I said, “’cause there ain’t no people here. There ain’t no people here, Pa, for the fever to fucking spread.”

He didn’t say nothing, but the next night he took me over to Willie’s Barbecue Bar and Whorehouse, so I guess he was trying any way he could to get me to stay. Even though that whore didn’t look nothing like that girl in the picture, I had her there on that sprung single bed, with us both sweating all over the bare mattress.

From then on, every Friday night, he took me with him, paying for the beer and the whores with an occasional longhorn steer. Willie’s had the toughest damned barbecue in all creation.

The food was bad, but at least it was a change from cooking. And there were good things about Willie’s, too. Willie, who had been a lineman, knew enough about power to keep his stolen electricity up, and he had an old television in the bar that played lots of commercials with smiling people in them, so I knew life was rolling on real happy somewheres else.

It was more fun watching commercials on Willie’s old television set than it was fucking Willie’s hard, ugly whores.

Then one day, Willie started talking about how he’d like to move down to the Sierra Azul, down near where Tampico used to be, and he started getting this look on his face, this soft look that told me he didn’t belong in the desert no more.

He’d talk about the cool air in the mountains and, the way the bullfrogs sang after a rain. He said when he visited the mountains he found out that green wasn’t just one color, but a whole lot of them. Near Tampico, you could find every shade of green from the chartreuse of banana trees to the blue-green leaves of coffee.

I could tell Pa was scared of that soft look in Willie’s eyes. “Move down with a bunch of greasers?” Pa growled as he pushed his beer glass back and forth on its coaster of water melt. “You’ll get lice. Your whores’ll get crotch-rot.”

Willie’s softness left and a hard-scrabble despair, took its place. “Used to get business from all the way down to Austin, but everybody who’s any account’s done left. Them bikers and dope-heads don’t bother coming up to San Saba to get their ashes hauled. Either that, or they ain’t got the money. Texas is dead. I can read the writing on the wall, and you’d best,” too.”

“Greasers, Willie,” Pa reminded him.

Three weeks later, when we come back for some beer and barbecue and whores, we found Willie’s place all boarded-up; and in the street in front of the bar, Pa kicked the bejesus out of a trash can.

“Come on, Pa,” I told him, grabbing his arm. It was dark but still hot, and the streets stank of garbage and shit.

He pulled away from me and kicked the trash can again, sending orange peels and egg shells exploding out of the top. Against the wooden wall of the bar, the can made a clap as loud and sharp as close-struck lightning.

“Shit. Shit!” Pa said. He’d drunk most of two six-packs at the house, and was at the stage dynamite gets to when it ages and starts to leak, and the least, most accidental jolt win set it off.

“Come on home,” I said, standing out of fist’s reach.

When he kicked the can again, the tip of his boot punched through the rusting side, and he laughed. The can toppled, pulling him down with it. On the ground, he started to cry.

I didn’t try to help him up. When Pa was in one of his bad drunks it was best to keep away from him. We stayed there like that for a long time, in the street in front of Willie’s boarded-up bar; me with my hands in my pockets, waiting, and Pa crying, rolling around in dog stilt.

After that, Pa started going all the way down to Austin to get beer, and he’d go without me. He’d come home two and three days later sometimes, with a bad head and a black mood, and I’d have to clean the puke off his clothes and get some food down him.

Nights alone, I’d peek out my window at the coyotes, on the hunt for field mice, rattling through the dry corn. In the day when the air smelled of hot metal and dust, I’d go out in the bright sledgehammer sun and cool down, the Angus.

Pa’s drunks got worse, partly because he was mad at Willie, and partly because he was so damned scared, I begged him to come back in the evenings and not to leave me by myself. I was sixteen years old, but I was scared, too—scared of the coyotes, scared of the scorpions.

Pa always promised. “Be back this evening,” he’d say. But he never would, God, he never would, It would be two, or three, or four days before I’d see him. Pa was never real good at promises.

Then, one time, he brought a woman home from Austin and kept her for about a month, All that month he was looking over his shoulder at me, as if he thought I was going to try and jump her. The woman was sick-skinny, like a coyote, and she had a coyote’s hungry eye. She wore halter tops, and I could count her ribs. She looked like something the desert had kicked out.

I never did know what he saw in her. She wasn’t smart enough for company and not pretty enough for bed. I guess he finally figured that out, too, because when she started bitching about the outdoor plumbing and the fire ants, he took her back.

Pa settled down again then, except for him drinking more than he should. He held it pretty much together, though, up to the day T.J. drove a horse trailer full of ostriches over to our place to say goodbye.