Gay Place (64 page)

Anybody around here know? he said to her. We’ll ask Arthur sometime, he said, his dead face staring, continuing the walk through the garden, pointing out the names of shrubs and plants and flowers to the little girl.

He had been a whole person in the beginning, nice-talking nice-kissing like Greg, nice-dancing in his arms at garden parties months ago, nice whiskey breath in her face and nice drunken laughter intermingling over wines and books and broken salad bowls. It had all been so pretty in the beginning when —

“Dead Man,” the Governor said. “Not much to look at, but awfully good company.”

The only sounds that came to them were the night noises from the dark creekbed and the faraway music of the Mariachis. The shadow of the frame cabin was up ahead. They came through the gate and paused to examine the tombstone in the yard.

“Look here,” the Governor said, striking a match so they could read the words.

JOHN HERMAN JACKSON

1898–1935

“He’s inside,” the Governor said.

A set of vague questions was paused in the mouths of the visitors, but they hesitated now and waited to see for themselves. The Governor shook the front door and then stepped inside and switched on a light.

“Dead Man!” the Governor shouted. “Hey, Dead Man!”

There were muffled, shuffling sounds from another room, and then the old man appeared at the doorway, blinking his eyes and smiling, his white hair in his face. The Governor made the introductions. Sarah nodded and took his hand when her turn came. She had been here a dozen times before, but Dead Man Jackson did not remember names or faces. He knew only Arthur Fenstemaker.

“Dead Man,” the Governor began, stretching in the length of a ruptured, faded sofa, “we’ve been havin’ a party …” He described the events of the past several days, the visit with the moving picture people in the desert, the shooting of his scene, the trip back culminating in the party now going on up the road. The old man smiled and nodded.

“How about a drink, Dead Man!” the Governor shouted. The old man came alert, a broad gummy smile on his face. He rose and went into one of the darkened rooms, returning in a moment with a pale bottle.

“Bootleg hootch,” the Governor said, looking satisfied at everyone. “It’s Dead Man’s … It’s the best.” Old jelly glasses were brought out, and everyone had a taste of the whiskey mixed with tap water. The Governor finished his before the others. He stood and stretched.

“Goodbye, Dead Man,” he said, and then raising his voice, “I said goodbye, Dead Man!” The old man gripped his hand and waved to the others.

“Okay Hoot Gibson,” the Governor said. “How ’bout a little benediction.”

Hoot Gibson weaved unsteadily in his cowboy boots, holding his jelly glass just above his head.

“Hoot Gibson — I should have told you folks before now, Hoot Gibson used to be a preacher,” the Governor said.

“Minuhstah th’ Gospel,” Hoot Gibson put in, smiling at everyone.

“He was a hellfire good one around here,” the Governor continued, “Nothing that would shake you folks up, but a good one for the people around here. Simple, straightforward sermons everybody could understand. Dignified. All that … But it got so he couldn’t get himself out of bed on Sunday mornings. He’d get drunk Saturday night on Dead Man’s whiskey and was paralyzed next day. So he came to work for me so we could feed him twenty-five-year-old Ambassador … Okay Hoot Gibson.”

“Deahleh Buhloved,” he began … “we awh gathuhed heah to —”

“No … No …”

Hoot Gibson rambled on, the words tumbling out of him: “See howuh good an’ howuh pleasant it is fah breathahren to dwell togetheh in …” He made a kind of sign in the air with the jelly glass, and they filed wordlessly out into the open. The visitors still waited for some explanation, and Arthur Fenstemaker finally began to talk about Dead Man.

“Dead Man,” the Governor said, “was a famous bootleg whiskey maker and salesman in these hills when I was a youngster. He made the best. Everybody came to Dead Man — they called him Herman then. But the Federals got on to him after a time and they began closing in. That was when Dead Man died. He simply expired up here in the hills. His family had a funeral for him, pine casket, tombstone, the works. Everybody forgot about it then. The only time they thought about Dead Man was when they were reduced to swilling the inferior grade stuff that came into circulation after Dead Man died.

“Then one night there were a bunch of folks sittin’ around, passing a bottle back and forth between them. Someone said, ‘You know, that tastes like Herman’s.’ ‘Damn fit dudn’t,’ another one said, and before long everybody knew he was back, somewhere in the hills, turning it out again. Well it got so there was a lot of talk and jokes and stories, and the Law heard about it and went lookin’ for Dead Man again. That time they got him and sent him off to the pen. When they let him out finally, he came home to find most of his family gone or died off and all his equipment destroyed. He was an old man then, so I asked him if he would like to come live on my property. He said ‘sho’ but first he headed straight for the cemetery and dug up that damn tombstone and put it back down there in the front yard. He paid for it, you see, and he was going to keep it for his own.”

“There’s a scenario for you, Ed,” Greg Calhoun said. “Use a bunch of Spanish peasants in the cast, write it in Japanese, dub it in Greek, and throw in your English subtitles. You’ll have a classic that’ll take all the prizes.”

They walked along the road back toward the house. A spectacular silver moon had now appeared from behind a distant hill, and the soft light bathed the land.

“Is there a part in it for me?” Vicki said. “You forgot girls.”

“Lots of girls,” Greg said, “all running around with their dressfronts open. You know those peasants, they —”

“At the funeral,” the Governor said. “There were a good many girls at the funeral. Dead Man was very popular in those days. What a funeral! It was the real thing, with mourners and bunches of flowers and all the women crying. Everything was gray — it rained and rained and we never saw the sun and even the flowers were sick and pathetic looking. I remember when they carried that pine box off and the family followed in beat-up jalopies, I never felt so mortal. I knew I was going to die then …

“And then old Dead Man came back, and it was like the redemption. Old Dead Man came back and I wasn’t ever going to die. All the high and mournful music was ended, and we were all going to live forever like the Gods. We — what the hell’s that up ahead?”

Jay had been attempting to pull himself from the mud and up the craggy side of the creekbank for what seemed an hour to him. He had lain at the bottom for a time, soaked in the thick dampness, the water coming through the back of his dinner jacket and under his arms. There was a gaping hole in the knee of his trousers, and he had struck his head on something. When he raised his hand to touch the sore place he had left a smear of mud across his cheek which was beginning to dry against his skin. He had not seen the others approaching until he reached the top and tried to stand.

He stood in front of them, weaving, regarding the sky.

“Jay — it’s Jay,” Vicki said. They moved toward him.

“Damn — what happened to him?”

“Look at him.”

“He’s hurt … Oh Jay you’re hurt.”

“What happened?” The authority of the Governor’s voice came at him.

“Nothing … really,” he said. “I was just … just trying to take a shortcut. To catch up. You take a walk to Dead Man’s?”

“Yes. What happened?” Sarah said.

“Just fell off in the creek, trying to find a shortcut.”

Shavers and Greg Calhoun got hold of his arms and helped him toward the back of the big house. Upstairs they watched him undress and change, and then Sarah, Vicki and Mrs. Fenstemaker moved in close to look at his head.

“He ought to have stitches,” Mrs. Fenstemaker said. “He really ought to have stitches.”

“He ought to have his head examined,” Sarah said grimly. She turned and moved back downstairs with the others. Mrs. Fenstemaker and Vicki remained behind, and then only Vicki.

“You were drunk,” she said to him, smiling. “You were beautifully, gorgeously drunk. Do you remember? Do you remember any of it — dancing with me? You weren’t even making sense.”

He turned on his side and stared away from her.

“Yes I was. All I said was …”

“I know what you said. Is that all that’s on your mind? Do you care that much? I thought … we might be able to make one more run at it. But you just seem … Is it all gone between us?”

“No,” he said. “It’s all there, everything that was in the beginning. It just doesn’t amount to much.”

“I love you,” she said.

“How can you say that? Lord help us, how can you?”

She turned and headed toward the door. “Forget it,” she said.

“Wait a minute, Vic, I want to …”

“Tomorrow,” she said, and pulled the door behind her.

He lay on the bed for a period of time and then stood and looked at himself in the mirror. “I love me,” he said. “Out of the glade, Orpheus comes, bearing his misery under his arm.” He took a damp rag and wiped the crusted blood off the side of his head. He thought of looking in on Victoria Anne. And then a little drink, he said to himself, a little drink will —

Arthur Fenstemaker pushed open the door and looked at him.

“How you feel?” he said.

“Fine,” he said. “I was just dirty.”

“Well, the sky is falling …”

“What?”

“We’re in a hell of a fix. You feel like driving into town?”

“Sure. I guess. Why? What’s —”

“I thought we could get it put off,” the Governor said, half to himself. “Now I just don’t know … There’s going to be trouble in town tomorrow. There are going to be a thousand mad fanatics coming after me and I’m not going to be there but you are. You’re going to have to handle it until I can … I just now heard by phone. Haven’t had time to think. Got to
think.
Get packed and get ready. Sweet Mama’s got to go back, anyhow. You can drive her in …”

T
HEY LEFT SOME TIME
after midnight with the music of the Mariachis echoing in the hills. There had been only a few early departures: the very old or the very young, returning to the city at a respectable hour, and a brace of radio, television and newspaper people who had to prepare scripts, write stories, or process film. Most of the others stayed on, wandering through the house or in the gardens or racing their cars down the moonlit graveled roads. A sobering buffet breakfast was being served on the main patio as Jay and Mrs. Fenstemaker headed out the driveway.

Jay had tried to find Sarah; there was something he had to say to her, though whatever it was seemed only a shapeless phrase in his mind. Perhaps he had wanted merely to touch her hand, but she was nowhere to be found. He had caught sight of Vicki once, looking down on her from the balcony above the patio. She was dancing the mambo with someone, and a crowd had gathered to watch. The Governor was at a desk in one of the upstairs rooms, talking on two telephones, unable to discuss anything, waving Jay and Mrs. Fenstemaker out the door.

Edmund Shavers had stopped Jay in the hall, wanting to talk. It seemed as improbable and out of context as all the rest of it when he offered him the job. “You don’t know anything about making pictures, but you don’t have to,” Shavers said. “I need someone with me … I’d like to have you with me. You’d be living close to your daughter, and perhaps you and Vicki can even patch things up. She’s been talking about the possibility.”

“I don’t know,” Jay said to him, dizzy with the shortness of time and the urgency for decision.

“Think it over,” Shavers said.

He had thought it over. He thought it over now, steering the big car through the hills, toward the city, with Mrs. Fenstemaker asleep in the back seat. He had looked in on Victoria Anne; it was the last thing he had done. The little girl lay bunched up in the middle of the gigantic bed, deaf to the sounds from outside: whoops of Mexican musicians and the crash of breakfast trays. He kneeled down and pulled the covers up round her pink shoulders, thinking that if he could remain in this darkened room beside her, the sounds coming through the window and the silk draperies stirring next to him, everything would somehow be fine, absolutely peaceful and secure.

For several years the absence of the girl had not really touched him. He thought it had in the beginning, but it was nothing comparable to the sense of loss that now filled his chest. The first loss of the girl had been very like the loss of love. There had been some dull shapeless pain during those years; the ceaseless, stultifying laying on of everyone’s drugstore therapies had even been a part of it. But now the girl was back and love was back — at least the promise of it was back — and the possibility that all this could be lost again, irretrievably lost, came to him with searing finality.

They reached the deserted, wet-washed streets of the city at two in the morning. Mrs. Fenstemaker began to stir as he drove up the steep incline of the driveway in front of the Governor’s mansion. She was nearly incoherent with sleep as he walked her to the door. She would be awakened at seven for a breakfast downstairs with some Junior Leaguers; there would be a ceremony at somebody’s tomb later in the morning and at noon she would address a businesswomen’s luncheon. There were a half-dozen other appointments on her schedule in the afternoon, and she might conceivably get involved in this march of the segregationists. There was Arthur Fenstemaker sitting in a padded room at his ranch in the hills, talking on two telephones, the big vein in his forehead purple and distended. The Governor would be trying to hold his world together, thousands of madmen at each other’s throats, and here I am, Jay thought, attempting to keep my small spheres all of a piece and contain the confusion in my head.

He drove the car through the winding Capitol grounds, the trees and lawns and statues glistening under the moon; he stood for a moment before the granite building, looking away from it toward the trees. Old Kermit, he thought, Old Mad Kermit had wandered on these grounds a week ago and gone home to hang himself. There was a story about Kermit and one of the jobs he held after college. The placement office had found him a teaching fellowship somewhere in the Middle West, and he had lasted five months there. His dismissal came one midnight in the bedroom of the president’s wife. “She was old and terrible looking,” Kermit had told him once, “but man I loved her. You know why? ’Cause nobody else did. It was a great passion — one of my greatest. I crawled into her bedroom window one night and stood there in my pajamas, loving the old smell of her. I hadn’t even put on my clothes. I’d just been lying in my own bed and the idea occurred to me. So I just took a walk in my peejays and stood there in the middle of her bedroom and declared my love. ‘I’m in love with you, Mrs. Pennington,’ I said. ‘I can’t help it.’ Then the president of the college came in and canned me on the spot. I mean, man, nobody
loves
anymore …”