Waveland (14 page)

“Ick,” Eddie said.

“I'm telling you, Eddie, you want to hire that kind of thing out. Take my word for it.”

There was a silence in the room then. It was darker with the TV off. The streetlights outside sent tree limb shadows in through the windows. The room looked gargantuan, like who would have a TV room the size of a small auditorium?

“Shit,” Eddie said. “That is some shit.” Greta gave Vaughn a look that he took to mean
Good work
, and then the three of them all stood up at the same time, walking toward the kitchen and the back door, where Eddie was sure to exit.

Later that Thanksgiving night Vaughn told Greta that she deserved a better companion than he could ever be, a better person, a person with fewer problems, maybe a people person.

“I dislike people people,” she said. “For your information.”

“I used to behave better than I do now,” he said. “When you're a person of a certain age everything changes and the world”—here he swept his arms in a wide arc, the better to compass the territory to which he wanted to refer—“which used to be attractive, possibly charming at times, turns out to be a sewage hole of immense proportion, unimaginable proportion, overrun with dimwits. This knowledge doesn't encourage anybody.”

“We've had a lovely holiday dinner,” Greta said.

“No, we did not,” Vaughn said. “We had turkey and other holiday things, but the dinner was by no means lovely. The dinner was a tragic mimicry of holiday kitsch—four empty
husks repeating a performance that long ago lost meaning for all of us.”

“The turkey was dry,” she said.

“I don't mean the turkey,” Vaughn said.

“Vaughn,” she said. “I want you to listen to me. Once I fucked a guy in a gas station toilet. The men's toilet. He was a good looker, too. It had been a while. We were pumping gas at the same island in the middle of the night and we started talking, and within minutes we moved it right into the toilet. I was young and needy then, but I surprised myself with that. I had been trying to get across town. I was traveling and I'd been out a long time. The performance wasn't my finest hour, but everything still worked. Afterward we went to the local IHOP, where he seemed like a regular, and we ate a joyful dinner—greasy bacon, sloppy eggs, hotcakes on the side.”

“Hmm,” Vaughn said. “My kind of girl.”

“I appreciate
that,”
she said, giving him two hand guns.

A few days later Vaughn took Eddie to the Hot-2-Trot for beers. He felt guilty for running Eddie off on Thanksgiving, and said as much, apologizing.

“Happens to me all the time,” Eddie said. “I don't worry about it.”

They sat up on stools and watched the tattoo girl move around behind the bar. Vaughn said, “When Gail and I split I was thinking of getting some kind of dinky job, just to change things up. You know? Get out of the world I'd been in.”

“Sure,” Eddie said.

“You want to have some menial job that puts you on the sidelines for a while, where nothing is at stake, or at least not at stake in the way you're used to. You get up, have a clear head, nothing you're responsible for, and you go to work and sit around earning your minimum wage. And at night you go home, clean up, and then you're fresh and ready, and nothing
to worry about until the next morning. It's like being a kid again.”

“So did you?”

“No,” Vaughn said. “I thought about working in a gas station. As you may know, I worked in a gas station for a short period when I was a kid. I don't know why that always appealed to me. Maybe the smell. But it would have to be an old gas station, not like the ones out there now.”

“We still got a couple those over here,” Eddie said.

“I know that, and I considered applying,” Vaughn said. “But I came up short. I don't think I'm cut out for retail. Too much sneezing. People will sneeze all over you if you let them. Go to any restaurant and there's always somebody sneezing, blowing those germs out twenty-three feet or whatever it is. And that's not all of it; that's just the start, the sneezing. I don't need to tell you—”

“No,” Eddie said.

“You'll walk up to a car and some guy'll let you have it just like that. No chance to escape.”

Eddie seemed barely attentive. He was watching the bar girl's butt. The tattoo was much in evidence—colorful, elaborate, and it dipped in the center, like all of them do, as if to say, “Enter Here.”

Vaughn said, “So I half expected Gail to bring this Tony kid over for Thanksgiving. She goes out all the time, though. Saturday she was out all night. I got worried, but Greta persuaded me to wait. I mean, I don't know where the guy lives, anyway. I don't know what we could've done.”

“I heard,” Eddie said. “Greta asked me to look the guy up. I'm working on the address.”

Vaughn leaned away, squinted at Eddie.

“Quit it,” Eddie said. “I'm just helping out. Maybe talk to him in the sweetest possible way, suggest that he, too, has something to lose.”

“Don't go too far with that,” Vaughn said. “Could get nasty.”

Eddie tapped his bottle. “I don't mind a little nasty now and again. Keep your hand in the game, so to speak. Anyway, she asked, so that's that.”

“She asked,” Vaughn said.

Eddie went off to the bathroom in the back of the place, and Vaughn ordered more beer for both of them. The girl with the tattoo's name was Chandra, she said.

“What's with the tattoo?” Vaughn asked when she slid the new bottles to him, one at a time.

She reached around behind her and tugged at the waistband of her jeans. “Had it awhile,” she said. “Me and some girls got them one night we were partying.”

“You like tattoos?”

“They don't hurt anybody. Guys like 'em. You've been keeping an eye on it, yeah?”

“I have it under surveillance,” Vaughn said, dropping money on the bar.

She smiled as she picked up the bills. “They speed things up,” she said. “I don't see it very often. It's back there all the time.”

Eddie got back on his stool and the girl moved away. “You hitting?” he said.

“Not now, not ever,” Vaughn said.

“You know that thing you were talking about, the shit job? I did that when I got out of rehab. I got this thing at the movie theater in Gulfport. Manager. The West Gulfport Four, a fourplex
where they played stuff a week or two after it left the mall.”

“I always wanted a movie theater,” Vaughn said.

“Doubt that,” Eddie said. “I didn't do much except ride herd on the kids. They ran the place, made the eats, took tickets, started the projectors. I inherited the projection kid named Delveaux from the previous manager. Kid was pissed he didn't get the manager job, so he never started a movie on time. People would come for a three-thirty Saturday picture and at three-forty-five they'd start coming out asking where the movie was. If it got real late on a Saturday, I went upstairs to get Delveaux on the job—he'd be napping, or reading porn magazines he had stashed up there—but if it was an ordinary day, I'd just call him from the stinking hole of an office I had behind the snack counter.”

“You get to pick the movies?”

“Shit,” Eddie said. “You kidding? They came out of someplace in Alabama. I had nothing to do with it.”

“I'm not having a theater if I can't pick the movies,” Vaughn said.

“Yeah, I'll bet your movies are going to draw the big crowds,” Eddie said. “They'll be waiting in the rain to get in.”

“The shit. You got no idea what movies I'd show.”

“Rashômon,”
Eddie said.
“Picnic.”

“You got me,” Vaughn said. “So what happened with you and these kids?”

“The kids were okay. There was the guy Delveaux, a geeky kid named Greg or something, two girls, Tink and Haley—one of them with lousy skin, both with the bodies all the kids have now. They were supposed to wear uniforms, but I let them wear whatever they wanted. That earned me
some points for a while. Then the regional manager came and found them in matching tube tops.”

“Cool,” Vaughn said.

“Looked good to me, but the regional guy was all of eighteen and very serious. He said the outfits were unprofessional. He decided we all needed to wear white shirts. ‘It'll be like a uniform,’ he said. ‘But it
won't feel
like a uniform.’ This was his personal breakthrough, I think.”

“That won't work,” Vaughn said. “Cheese, nachos, butter, chocolate—even when they're clean they're filthy.”

“So anyway the girls wore that bandeau stuff underneath, left the shirts open to the navel, so the regional twit didn't put me out of business.”

“You're kind of skeevy in your old age, aren't you?”

“Every opportunity,” Eddie said. “You take what you can get.”

“You want another beer?”

“Naw,” Eddie said. “I need some sleep. Anyway, the job didn't do anything for me. I didn't last long. I may have been a little
too
unprofessional with one of the girls, the one named Tink. I mean, how's a guy not fall in love with a girl named Tink? You know?”

“Amen,” Vaughn said.

“Regional Man got wind of it and told me my services were no longer required. I considered ripping his face off, but then I figured that would reflect badly on me and it probably wasn't worth it in the long run. I folded tents, said good-bye to the kids, and retired from the business.”

“Leaving Tink.”

“Yeah, I regret that. I went back a few times, but her interest did not last. She may have been moved by mercy.”

Saturday Gail and Greta were out shopping and Vaughn was alone at the house. He poked around in Gail's bedroom for a while, didn't find anything of interest, then draped himself across her bed. The French doors were open and the breeze was blowing across his chest and he was thinking he had less of a life than before, where “before” meant just about anything at all—twenty years ago or yesterday. It had all been a steady downward drift by his reckoning. That wasn't helping much, so he went downstairs to see what he could find in the kitchen.

He found Pepperidge Farm Orange Milano cookies, a small pleasure that he had years before introduced to his mother. She loved them. She only ate one at a sitting, but she savored it. He remembered sitting with her at the dining table while she ate a single Orange Milano after dinner with her tea. He didn't see her very often. He and Gail would visit once a
year in Atlanta. When his mother was still healthy that was great. She was funny and full of oddly wised-up ideas, always presented as if she were shocking herself with her own candor. She was a woman out of an Austen book, or some other, having seen many things you would not have imagined, smart and quiet in equal measures, with miraculous timing and a gift for the language.

Vaughn took the cookies back to the TV room and turned on the set that he'd bought four or five years before, a Sony flat-screen CRT with about two hundred pounds of glass in the front. He'd researched this television for months, determined to get a set that was top of the line. Gail was appalled at the study and the price. Now Vaughn clicked it on and tuned to CNN where they were running some kind of special report on hurricanes, a seasonal wrap-up. There was footage of Anderson Cooper tying himself to giant planters in front of hotels and doing the rest of those antics he made so popular pre-Katrina. Vaughn's mother would've said “Bon voyage,” or something similar. There were bright graphics about the relative strengths of various hurricanes of the last fifty years, and there were pictures of and captions about the 1900 storm in Galveston, and footage from different hurricanes in different years hitting small towns along the Gulf Coast, all of it cut together to music and hurricane sounds, with shouting reporters layered in here and there. Then there was video of people with chain saws cleaning up after. Good hurricanes make good neighbors. Lots of Katrina footage, naturally, with some stuff about the Mississippi coast he hadn't seen before.

After a while he started praying. He wasn't praying for anything in particular, just a preventive maintenance prayer,
alternating remembered versions of the Hail Mary and the Our Father, sort of under his breath, sort of in his head. This wasn't the first time, or even unusual; it was something he'd started maybe ten or fifteen years ago. It just happened one day and then he started doing it on and off, like when nothing else was happening, and he was alone. In fact, he wasn't sure he would call it praying so much as reciting prayers. When he was a kid he had prayed a lot; he liked to pray all the time. He would go to the Catholic church and it was chilly inside, and thick with that sweet church scent, the light filtering in through the stained glass, big statues and flowers up by the altar. He liked the church. What a wonderful thing it was, a relief, a place to start over. The best part was that he could go to confession and wash away all the sins he had committed since his last confession. Sometimes he would catch the opening of the Saturday confessions and then come back two hours later to confess again some new small sins that had tripped him up in the interval. He was, when young, exceedingly fond of absolution.

He would enter the confessional—maybe three feet square, the smell of polished wood mixed with the stale incense from the last High Mass and the smoke from the candles—and he'd get on his knees on the kneeler and hear the click as the switch under the kneeler alerted the priest, and he'd know that the same switch lit the tiny red bulb over the door, so the next person in line wouldn't inadvertently come in during the middle of his confession. It smelled insanely religious in there, like nowhere else on earth, saturated with the fragrance of the blessed, just a hint of the metallic, a suggestion of decay, the scent of the priest.

Absolution was a wonder, worth everything Catholic. The
sweetest idea imaginable. But much later in his life Vaughn confessed to a college priest who said he would withhold absolution if Vaughn was just going to go out and sin again— get drunk, or screw some girl, or cheat on a test. There's one in every crowd, was Vaughn's thought. His fucking job was to sit there and deliver the forgiveness, the asshole.

After that religion was like, Who needs it?

Vaughn adored the Church, but only the lovely, forgiving Church in his head.