Waveland (13 page)

“And the wife?” he said.

“Late thirties,” she said. “He's very excited about it, too. Everybody seems to be excited for him. I personally think it's disgusting, of course.”

“He sired this child when he was beyond sixty?” Vaughn said.

“I believe that's correct,” she said.

“Oh holy night,” he said.

“Well, I just thought you ought to know,” Gail said. “I thought you ought to keep that in mind. Anything's possible. The world is still open to you.” She paused for a minute and patted his arm.

He looked at her, trying to figure out what she was thinking.

“Nah,” she said. “Just kidding.”

“Gee, thanks,” he said.

“Look at this white light over here,” she said. He looked. She was right. It
was
something. Above the trees in the east the sky had gone sweet and creamy. Aerosol whipped-topping white.

Ten days sailed by with minimum incident. Gail was missing in action a couple of nights, one overnight, but there were no visible wounds; and so, during this period, the three of them were a happy, if elaborated, family. They sat on the deck and watched ducks in the evenings. The third or fourth time they convened on the deck there were dozens of ducks about, maybe two dozen, squawking and running after one another in the grass at lake's edge. There were five swans—two full grown, white, and three that were younger, leggy and still gray. It was late afternoon.

“Are these swans doing the right thing?” Greta asked. “Is this the right time of year for them to have these babies?”

“They're late,” Gail said. “Maybe a month, maybe two, seems like.”

Vaughn had in mind the duck scene from the first season of
The Sopranos
. Tony by the pool, dreaming of another life.
He had no idea about Greta. He never knew what she was thinking anyway. She was probably thinking about poisoning him the way women poisoned men on Court TV. Or maybe she was thinking about swans—how they're made, why they have those feet, what are feathers? It would be like Greta to look it up in the wildlife book her husband had given her.

Vaughn said, “You have that bird book. You could look it up.”

“What, Bo's bird book? How do you know about that?”

“Saw it at your house,” he said. “One day. You weren't there. It's inscribed.”

“I know that,” Greta said. “What, do I look like I'm pining away for Bo here? Not on your life. I'm Lucky Girl.”

“Annie Oakley,” Gail said. Then she looked up, caught the expression on Greta's face. “Just kidding,” Gail said. “Joking around.”

“Don't you start, too,” Greta said.

“Too?”

“Yeah. Your husband has the morbid curiosity blues every once in a while.”

“He's not my husband,” Gail said.

“Right. Sometimes I forget, you know?” She turned back to Vaughn. “I just don't picture you creeping around the house going through my things.”

“Ease up, will you? I pulled a book out of a bookcase.”

Greta waggled her hand. “You're right. Sorry. Just caught me by surprise. And I am lucky, after what happened to Gisele—her face, all that. I could be Girl With One Eye, but instead here I am with you, watching these ducks.”

Gail said, “They come because of the lake. If we didn't have the lake we wouldn't have the ducks.”

“That's right, honey,” Greta said.

“So he did that to her on purpose?” Vaughn said. “Ran her into that building or whatever it was?”

“It was a garage,” Greta said. “And, yes. He was a bastard.”

This was typical Greta-talk. Passing reference to the trouble she'd seen. Sometimes it was drug-related, her life on the lam in Los Angeles years before, skittering across town in the middle of the night in skimpy garments after being tossed out of a moving car by her husband, Bo, who was at that time a lowlife hanger-on in the screenwriting business. Her story was that he'd written one pathetic screenplay for some one-shot director and it had gone exactly nowhere, and this produced in Bo the realization that his life was unfair. From this he took his charter to heap manure on others near and dear, and that meant Greta mostly, and mostly Greta did not talk about it. Gisele was one of Bo's priors.

Later, of course, Bo took the big sleep.

Vaughn wasn't sure Gail knew what they were talking about, and he was going to say something by way of explanation, when Greta gave him a little cockeyed wave of the head that he figured meant leave it alone. So he turned back to the ducks.

The ducks were quacking a lot more than was attractive. They were also shitting on the lawn, or doing something that looked like shitting. He was thinking they probably weren't shitting, that they probably did that in the water, when they were sitting there, floating along, paddling, or whatever they did. He was thinking they must be doing something else on the lawn, but the way they wagged their butts it looked like shitting.

“What are they doing out there?” he said. “You see this?” He pointed at a duck with one of those iridescent green bands around its neck. “The mallard, there, or whatever it is. That a mallard? Whatever—you see what it did?”

“It's walking,” Greta said. “They walk funny. You'd walk funny if your feet were spatulas.”

Gail got up and leaned on the railing. “It feels like when I used to be grounded.”

“You are kind of grounded,” he said.

“Ah, man,” she said. “That's crap.”

“We need you,” Greta said. “Without you we'd get on each other's nerves so bad. I mean, there's trouble here.”

“You should go on a retreat,” Vaughn said. “Take a couple of weeks in the convent with the Sisters of Mercy. You'd be in there with the big drapes and the smelly furniture. Who knows? Maybe you'd like it?”

“I
would
like it,” Greta said. “That's been proven.”

“I'd go, too,” Gail said. “I'd be like some sainted nun.”

“You wouldn't be able to sneak out for meetings with Cheech,” Vaughn said.

“Don't call him that,” Gail said. Then she stopped a minute, as if an idea had come to her. “Maybe I should go to church, like tonight. Anybody for church?”

Vaughn got up and put an arm around her shoulder. She was steady, no shrugging him off. “I could go to church,” he said. “We could move in there. Think they'd mind?”

“Don't discourage her if she wants to go to church,” Greta said. “He wants to go all the time,” she said to Gail. “Talks about it, anyway.”

Vaughn threw bread to the ducks. They quacked like crazy. The sun was missing in action, cloud-obscured, making the
afternoon pleasant, almost winterlike. He hugged Gail and kissed her temple, and, as he pulled back, caught a glimpse down her shirt of her small breasts in a padded bra. He looked away quick, tossed more bread, and more bread, a fever of bread tossing.

“Eat up, guys,” he said to the ducks. “Life is short.”

“Is not,” Gail said, pulling the loaf out of his hand. She fished out a slice and started chewing on it.

“Don't these ducks belong to somebody?” he said.

Gail sighed and shook her head. “Wild,” she said. “They're wild ducks.”

“They saw the water and landed, right?” Greta said.

“Mrs. Posey got the swans,” Vaughn said. “So why is it strange to think maybe she got the ducks, too?”

“Mrs. Posey is the head of the Swan Committee,” Gail said. “The swans were eight hundred apiece. That's what she said. And when they have babies we have to give the babies back to the people who sold us the swans. That's the deal. She said she would have paid for the swans herself if the board hadn't approved.”

“If I had an air rifle I could use these ducks for target practice,” Vaughn said.

Air rifle
. It had been a while. Probably the ducks would have waddled away at high speed with the sound of the first shot. Not to mention the projectile itself. These ducks were particularly pretty, he thought, in an iridescent way. And he didn't want to shoot them, though he had shot at turtles from their neighbor Bill Ansen's deck one night several summers before. He used to see Bill Ansen out there all the time shooting into the water, but who knew he was shooting turtles? Then Vaughn went over there one evening and Bill Ansen
showed him how much fun it was, shooting at the turtles swimming in the lake. The pellets just ricocheted off the turtles' backs, Bill Ansen said. He was a great guy, Bill Ansen. But then he died.

“I think I will go to church,” Gail said.

“Me, too,” Greta said.

“You're going to church, too?” Vaughn said.

“Sure. Won't hurt,” Greta said. “People go to church all the time. So, yeah, we're going to church. Right, Gail? We're going to kneel in the pews. We're going to say some prayers, and ask forgiveness, and like that. We may stay there all night long. We may never leave.”

“I think I'm going, too,” he said.

“I like the way church smells,” Gail said. “That's the main thing.”

“That
is
the main thing,” Vaughn said, flipping the remaining four slices of bread into the air, one after the other, in the direction of the ducks. The slices spun like edible Frisbees and seemed to linger, weightless, in the air, before falling to earth.

Eddie came over for Thanksgiving dinner and stayed to watch
World Series of Poker
reruns, and he got so pissed Vaughn thought he was going to wreck the place. Vaughn had to change the channel to calm Eddie down. He switched to the Discovery Channel and after a few minutes of some travel program Eddie started attacking the hosts of that program.

“You suck,” he said. “You bunch of fucks. I mean, who'd have thought you could get paid to go around and look at old towns and shit? I mean, I could fucking do that. I've been some places.”

Gail said she was tired and was going to get into her pj's, and left the three of them in the TV room. Eddie hated everything, which made him a perfect companion for Vaughn; but Vaughn didn't want Eddie to know that, or maybe he didn't want to admit that they had the same view of people on television. Eddie divided the world into the people on television
and the rest of humanity, and in this division the people on television came out on the short end of things.

Vaughn kept cycling through the channels. He caught a lot of football, and some other holiday fare. He tried to pacify Eddie with a late NFL game, but no luck. He tried a stop on the agricultural channel, but Eddie had some choice things to say about the cows. Then they hit some news channels.

“Fucking Arabs,” Eddie said. “They're fucking everywhere. I'm over at the house watching the big screen and I just can't get away from them. What're these guys here doing?”

He gestured toward the screen where there were some street scenes in some town somewhere—maybe Iraq, maybe Afghanistan. Guys in robes, some huts, the usual. A few big cars coming through in a motorcade of some sort.

“What're they doing?” Eddie said. “They should wash up or something. They should get running water, for fuck's sake.”

“Easier said than done,” Greta said. “It's like a desert over there.”

“And yet, here comes somebody in a fucking Mercedes-Benz!” Eddie said. He pointed at the TV. “These people really burn me up. This is like some bad television show that some producer sold the studios and now we have to fucking watch it for ten years.” He got up and shook his head, glaring at the TV. He slapped his forehead with his palm and pointed at the screen with his stump. “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,” he said, quoting somebody.

Greta motioned for Vaughn to change the channel, so he flipped through a few and got to one of the HD channels where they were running an old episode of
Sunrise Earth
—a lovely marsh with some mountains in the distance, a speckled white horse in the foreground up to its ankles in water,
drinking, then swishing its head around, tossing water drops every which way.

“Now you're talking,” Greta said.

“It's god-awful sandy over there,” Eddie said. “I don't blame those people. I knew a bunch of them. They were fine. Maybe a little bit excitable, but they were fine. Thing is, you look at them and pretty quick you figure out what's going on. I mean, you thought Catholics were bad? They are nothing compared to these people. These people are fucking terrified that God is going to rip out their eyes, split their tongues, drive nails through other parts. They're screwing the sheep and God knows what else, but they are
so
terrified. They pray hard over there. Hard, I'm talking. That's when I really understood them, when I saw that. They are God-fearing fuckers, what God might do, what trouble he might visit on them. He'll make the goat chew on the baby; that's the way he works. A giant snake will come up out of the river and steal the baby and swallow it whole, and then lay out there in the sun with this huge bulge in it where the baby is. That's the way they think. They're demented children, horrid children.”

“This is a good-looking horse,” Vaughn said, without turning away from the screen. “He's pretty gorgeous standing in that water, isn't he? You know anything about horses? What kind of horse is that, anyway?”

“Big and white,” Greta said.

“When I was in Pasquar or Nurwat or something like that,” Eddie said, “you could hardly believe it. Those people lived in a world of dirt. Incredible. Remember when they found Saddam in that hole? Multiply that a billion times and that's what the place is like. That's what those people are like. They're sweet, but the world they have is harsh. Can you imagine
Bush hiding in a hole somewhere? For
any
reason? I mean, his ass would hide at the drop of a hat, but, you know, in a
hotel
or something. When the fucking president of a country hides in a hole, what kind of country do you think it is to start with? I don't mean they're backward, but, Jesus, they are
some kind
of backward. What can they do? Sand in their eggs, sand in their eyes, sand in their shorts. Try putting on a rubber hat full of sand every day—”

“They wear rubber hats?” Greta said.

Vaughn clicked off the set. He turned around and looked at Eddie. Eddie looked mournful. “Sorry,” he said.

“Before my father died,” Vaughn said, “and it was kind of a messy death, all things considered, and I take the blame for that. I take responsibility. I loved my father but I didn't shoulder the burden when it fell to me; I didn't take care of him when he needed care, and now guilt comes and goes like a puncture wound that heals, scars, and reopens. Anyway,
before
he died, once I went over there to see him, and he was kind of short and fat, and he was having a terrible time with heat rash or something like that in his crotch; he had trouble reaching the places where the skin was abraded, and he needed help putting the medicine on, so I ended up having to put the talcum or Desenex or whatever it was on his balls because he said he couldn't see to do it himself. I told him to do it by feel, but he wouldn't, and he was a strong-willed motherfucker and he could make you do stuff just by staring you down. So there I was, him in a wheelchair with his suet-white legs spread, and me down on all fours in front of him, shaking the can and spreading this powder all over his testicles. It was like a medical snowstorm down there. It was blinding.”