Waveland (19 page)

He went into the hamburger joint at the end of the concourse
and ordered a plain burger and a Diet Coke, and he went to the counter to pay for it but didn't have any change. There was an older woman behind the register, a woman about sixty-five with white hair. Her name tag was blank. She seemed nice. She asked him how he was doing, and he said he was doing fine, and he asked her how
she
was doing, and she said she was doing fine, that every day was a better day than the last.

He said, “Pardon me?”

She said, “That's just the way it is. It's the way I look at life, the way things go for me. I could tell you a thing or two. You've got to wait for your burger anyway.” “That's right,” he said.

So the woman said, “We've got this hamster. He's a tiny little thing. Kind of a dwarf hamster. We call him Teeny-Weeny. Every morning I get up and I say, ‘Good morning, Teeny-Weeny. How are you this morning? Rise and shine!’ And then I go about my morning business. I clean myself up, I have a little breakfast, I take care of my husband, Harold— he's close by seventy, soon. Around nine or ten I get ready to come here to work, and I kiss Harold on the forehead, and I stop by the hamster cage and I say, ‘I got to go to work now. You be a good boy today, Teeny-Weeny. I'll see you later. I love you, Teeny-Weeny,’ and then I come on to work. And I'm just filled with the pleasures, you know?”

Another customer came up and Vaughn stood aside so the other customer could pay his bill, and the woman took his money and made change and told him to have a good day.

“So anyway,” she said, gesturing to draw Vaughn back toward her. “I come over here and put in a full day's work, a full shift. I get people food, I talk to them—it just could not be
better. At night I go home at the end of my shift, and there's Harold in his chair watching television, and there's Teeny-Weeny in his little cage, and I say, ‘Hello Teeny-Weeny, I'm home!’ Well, then I go over and let him out of his cage and let him crawl all over me for a while. Sometimes I put him down on Harold and let him crawl on Harold. Sometimes I leave him in his cage. One time we got him a special fire truck that went in his cage, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” Vaughn said. “Like a hamster fire truck?”

“That's right. We got him his own fire truck, but he never did like that fire truck because it always turned over on him, and he'd get caught underneath it, and he'd get kind of nervous when that happened. I'd open up the cage and take the truck off him and tell him, ‘It's okay. Don't you worry, Momma's right here.’ And I'd pet him a little—he liked that. Anyway, after I get home Harold and me will have some dinner, go on and watch some TV, then when it's time to go to bed, I'll holler out from the bedroom, ‘Good night, Teeny-Weeny. We love you!’ And we'll go on to sleep, don't you know? We've been doing that for some years. And every day is just better than the last.”

She turned and looked at the grill. The cook was standing there listening to her, and the burger was burning. “I think your burger's done,” she said to Vaughn.

“You're right,” the grill guy said. “We're ready.”

“You want me to have him cook you another one?” she said.

“No, that one's fine. Just give me that one and my Diet Coke, and I'll be out of your hair.”

“You meeting somebody today?” she said.

“I'm meeting my brother. He's coming in from Washington State,” Vaughn said.

“Oh, way up there by Alaska, isn't it?” she said.

“That's right,” he said.

“I always wanted to go to Alaska,” she said. “I'd take Harold and Teeny-Weeny and go up there on one of those boats, you know what I mean? We'd ride along on that big white boat. Boy, that would be the time.”

“How old is Teeny-Weeny?” Vaughn said.

“I don't really remember,” she said. “He's pretty old, though.”

“You take him on trips?” he said.

“We have,” she said. “We took him on a trip up the Natchez Trace, all the way to Nashville, Tennessee. That was something. Took Teeny-Weeny and Harold up there. I did all the driving. We did that on our vacation last summer. It was fun. We let Teeny-Weeny out in the car. He ran around. Sometimes he got under the seat—that was a little difficult when he got under the seat. He'd get stuck under there and start squealing, and we'd have to pull off the highway and get Harold out and get in the backseat and reach up under there and get Teeny-Weeny out. He did fine most of the way. Sometimes he sat on the armrest—we'd pull the armrest down and he'd sit up on that for a long time. Trouble was he kept getting stuck. He doesn't like to get stuck much. Fact is, that's probably the last thing he likes—getting stuck under something or having something fall on him. He's got one of those wheels, you know. He likes that pretty well. Makes a racket, though, when I'm trying to sleep.”

She was a short woman, very short but well-proportioned.
Her head did not come up above the top of the cash register. He wondered if there was some relation between her physical stature and her affection for the hamster. He wondered about Harold and about their house. He wondered about everything.

He got his change and slid onto the first stool by the register, keeping an eye on the woman, and took a bite out of the burger and a pull on the straw in the Diet Coke. He scanned the place for some pretty women to gaze at while chewing.

When Newton got off the plane he gave Vaughn a magazine he'd been carrying, some West Coast city magazine with a picture of himself on the cover—a feature about his company. After the awkward greetings and the wait at the baggage claim, they went out through a subterranean corridor to the parking garage. Newton looked way too healthy and bigger than Vaughn remembered. He looked a little like their father, but a bigger version of him, pumped up, everything about him bigger, inflated. His father, bloated.

“Glad you could come,” Vaughn said, as they emerged from the tunnel. He kept stepping away from his brother to get a better look. Newton looked less big once they got above ground.

“Thanks,” Newton said. “Good to get off that plane.”

“You look terrific,” Vaughn said.

“Yeah. I've been working out for a while, since, you know, Meredith passed. Not much else to do, really.”

“Sorry about that,” Vaughn said.

Newton flapped a hand. “I've just about rejoined the land
of the living by now,” he said. “You've got to let these things play out in their own time.”

They got to the car and stowed the luggage, then headed out to Highway 49 to make it down to the coast highway.

“I'm anxious to see what it looks like after Katrina,” Newton said.

“Looks just about like it did then,” Vaughn said. “Only drier.”

“They're not rebuilding?”

“Plan to, but things are dead slow. I don't know why— money mostly, I think. Storm just leveled everything along the waterfront, and everybody wants to put up a high-rise condominium; but prices are ridiculous, and there's insurance and that stuff on both ends. So mostly it's just as it was fifteen months ago.”

“That's crazy,” Newton said.

“Pretty much,” Vaughn said.

They rode down to the beach and turned west heading out to Menge Road, which was one of the few remaining arteries off the beach highway that still connected to Interstate 10. It also went right by Hidden Lake and Gail's house. The beach highway didn't seem to faze Newton, probably because he had no before pictures to compare with the after.

“I have this fantasy about living on a beach,” Newton said. “Looks like there's a lot of land for sale here.”

“I have this fantasy about taking women captive and having my way with them,” Vaughn said. “Especially young women. I take them to this place, to this room, lock the door, do anything I want. I touch them. I comb their hair. I unbutton their clothes. I worry, though—”

“I'd worry if I were you,” Newton said. He swung his hand out and popped Vaughn on the shoulder.

“What if they're not wearing pretty underclothes?” Vaughn said.

“That'd be a shame,” Newton said. “For a sick puppy like you.”

“You shouldn't come in here saying things like that.”

“You shouldn't be joking about stealing women,” Newton said. “What kind of guy are you? You're old. You should have stopped looking at women years ago.”

“Have you?” Vaughn said.

“I'm younger than you are,” Newton said. “I'm not that interested, but if I were I could look because I'm still viable. But I'm more interested in women my own age—you know, people with shared experiences, a shared cultural base. The same ideas about the world, something we share.”

“I'd just like to share their panties,” Vaughn said.

“That's not funny, Vaughn,” Newton said.

Vaughn rubbed his forehead a minute, looked at his brother, then looked back at the road. “lust fucking with you, Newton. You know? Jokes are still viable in the Deep South. We do jokes. We think they're funny. We kid around. Know what I mean? We don't have our heads so far up our rears that we can't see a joke coming about a mile away.”

“Some jokes are less funny than others,” Newton said. “Anyway, Gail was plenty upset when she called. What's the deal with you two?”

“We divorced a year ago. So I'm living with this other woman, and Gail's running around with some high-school kid, a tree-trimmer apparently. So the guy beats her up one night maybe a month ago and what am I going to do? She asked me to stay at the house. We came when called.”

“She told me,” Newton said.

“So now we're all there, all three of us. The kid, Tony, is around, apparently. He was over the other night, middle of the night, in his truck, in the yard. Yelling. We had a sit-down. He wasn't disgusting, just sort of, like, unreal in the way kids are when they're just getting started as people. And ridiculous, like peanut butter without bread. And has no sense of context, any context.”

“Complete with tattoos? Gail said he tattooed her neck,” Newton said.

“I didn't see any tattoos. With Gail, he drew his name like a tattoo on her neck. In ballpoint. Like we used to do at St. Anne's. Then he beat the shit out of her.”

“She said they had a fight,” Newton said.

“Well, he won,” Vaughn said. “She went to the hospital.”

Newton waved his hand toward the windshield. “Why are you going so slow here?” Cars were whizzing by them in both directions.

“I don't go fast anymore. I used to go fast, and now I don't go fast,” Vaughn said. “Since the crash.”

“You're a traffic hazard out here. Would you get over to the right if you're going to go this slow?”

“Fine,” he said. Vaughn put on the blinker, looked over his shoulder, looked in the rearview mirror, looked in the side mirror, looked in Newton's side mirror, looked in the rear-view mirror again, looked over his shoulder again, then eased over into the right lane.

After another minute Newton said, “You did all that for me?”

“Hey! You're catching on. So, how long are you going to be with us?”

“As long as it takes,” he said. “Get your blinker.”

“Okay,” Vaughn said, switching off the turn signal.

They drove along in silence for a few minutes. Vaughn thought his brother was a smug somebody. He wondered how he got to be so smug, so full of himself. You give a guy a couple of breaks and give him a bunch of money, put his face in the newspaper, give him a business. It kind of goes to his head after a while.

“Business good?” Vaughn said.

“Fine,” Newton said. “After a while it's just counting money. I wish I had some new project.”

Newton had strange facial hair. It was on his chin and under his lip but nowhere else. It was very well kept. The part on his chin looked like a large, well-cared-for mole. Vaughn had a hard time remembering Newton as the kid he'd played with years before. They had done all this stuff together, played soldiers, cowboys, gone to archery classes, played pool and Ping-Pong and gone to school and dated girls and hung out. It was kind of hard to feature that so many decades later.

Vaughn spent the rest of the drive time thinking about what it meant to love your brother—how it might be possible, how it was possible to not like him very much and still recognize him as part of your life and let him into your life in a way that you didn't let anybody else in. Take him for granted. Assume him. Vaughn was sure his life was better when Newton was two or three thousand miles away, and was sure his life was going to be more difficult now that Newton was closer than that.

Newton wanted doughnuts. Didn't they always want doughnuts? First thing? So Vaughn pulled into the Krispy Kreme and got in line. He said, “Gail writes down in a little book
the names of people who are going to get murdered, like Mrs. Robert Blake. She keeps a book of tragedies.”

“Two chocolate-covered and one custard-filled,” Newton said.

They crept up to the squawk box and Vaughn placed the order and the voice of the woman came out of the little box. He had some difficulty, because she thought he was saying mustard when he was saying custard, but eventually she got it. They inched forward behind the Dick Tracy Chrysler that was in front of them.

“So,” Newton said. “Things are pretty rough.” He was stretching out in the car in some way that seemed unattractive and way too personal. Too much twisting and picking at his clothes.

“They've been that way for a while,” Vaughn said.

“Yeah, but rougher now?”

“Did Gail say that?”

“We talk,” Newton said. “She calls me. We're friends. We've got some special connections.”

“Uh-huh. That's good,” Vaughn said. “And you text; you text a lot. Now, me, I don't text too much. I've texted in the past, but not so much now.”

“Come on, Vaughn, don't do that,” Newton said, sighing, looking out his side window at a Shell station that bordered on the drive-through side of the Krispy Kreme. “That was way back when. I just meant we're friends. So we talk. She's had a hard year.”

“She's not alone,” Vaughn said.

There was silence in the car for a minute or two, then Newton tried another angle. “You ever think about the parents?”

“All the time,” Vaughn said. “Sometimes more than think,
too. Father's pipe tobacco, it's like always turning up. Very peculiar. We didn't do such a good job with Father.”