Waveland (9 page)

It
was
heartbreaking. She was a little dull. He tried to be understanding. He figured she needed to be the way she was, that this was the price for normalizing her behavior. She needed flattery, she needed authority, she needed clarity, and it did not matter if these were poorly rooted. She became an NPR person, a reverse Stepford Wife, and every idea was canon, received over the airwaves, preached with fervor and charm, believed deeply, for the common good. A cigar-store liberal. Where before she was equal parts liberal, conservative, anarchist, hedonist, hair-puller, now she took positions about what could and could not be said about women, what jokes could and could not be told, what ideas could be countenanced and what ideas could not. That's where he had her,
reminding her that all ideas could be countenanced. She knew that, didn't she? Every idea is just a scheme, a deployment of players and elements, a reflection on possibility.

Wrong. And then, finally, they were not on the same wavelength. They no longer raised their eyebrows at the same things, snickered together, or shook their heads at the same sights, remarks, or ideas. It was as if one of them suddenly
fit in the world
and the whole structure of their relationship collapsed. Call it what you might, the change divided them to a degree that they could not have imagined. They lived together like that way too long.

Eddie knocked on the back door, then opened it and let himself into the kitchen. He went straight to the refrigerator and got out a bottle of beer, removing the cap with his teeth. “What're you guys doing?” he said.

“I'm hanging around waiting for Greta,” Vaughn said. “Gail's out of the hospital.”

“Good for her.” Eddie took a pull on the beer, then said, “They get the creep?”

“I don't think they're going to get anybody. Gail isn't going to give him up.”

“Great. Why doesn't she just invite him back over, give him a sap or something. Jesus.”

“I know.”

“Shit,” he said. “I just watched this war show. Fucking people are such fucks. Those old dudes who used to do television would never have put up with the shit they do now.”

“What're you talking about?”

“Usual shit,” Eddie said, bending over the sink to look out
into the backyard toward his garage apartment. “You know I can hardly remember a thing about what happened when the hand went? It was, like, all of a sudden there was mush on my arm.”

“That's ugly,” Vaughn said.

“Was,” Eddie said. “But that was the name of the game, ugly. I used to keep news stories. I had a laptop. You could get stuff online—message boards, news service. It was pre-Internet, almost. But we had a lot of crap over there. Pictures—bodies, body parts, tinker-toys, bits and pieces of people, like that ‘highway of death’ thing. Guys were trading that shit like bubble-gum cards. And I got stories from guys, from all over, the shit we did, atrocities, torture, whatever. It was just like this new one. We can't run a war anymore. It's all kids and grotesque coaches.”

“Now we
start
wars,” Vaughn said.

“Yeah, that's probably new.”

“And we're all driving to Wal-Mart with Support Our Troops ribbons magneted to the backs of our cars. Of course, every American is worth four thousand Iraqis. We're more human, I guess.”

“Covered that already,” Eddie said. “It's a fucking football game. Get over it.”

“I'm thinking I loathe this country these days,” Vaughn said.

“It's not what it was,” Eddie said. “That's for sure.”

“Maybe it'll get better,” Vaughn said. “In the fullness of time.”

Eddie held up his beer bottle for a toast and said, “Bad memories,” and Vaughn banged his Coke can into the bottle and they drank to that.

“The good news is I don't remember much,” Eddie said, looking at the handless arm. “Fucking memory doesn't work right. Shit happens and it's over and you're left with a before and after. It's crap. It barely even names the shit that happened—bomb, rocket attack, sandstorm. It's not a real full-color seven-channel surround-sound memory of the experience.”

“Could be that's a blessing,” Vaughn said.

“Maybe,” Eddie said. “Maybe not. You want to go to the bar? I'm going.”

“What, now?” Vaughn didn't want to go, but felt bad. He said, “I'm waiting here awhile. Maybe we'll come over later.”

Eddie left out the back door, taking a fresh beer from the refrigerator on his way.

He was right about memory. Vaughn's was spotty. He and Gail had a car crash on the highway once, him driving, and that had stuck with him pretty clear for a year or so, so that at times the whole event would replay itself in his head, except it was very fast. A few seconds, maybe, from when he lost control of the car in the rain at seventy miles an hour, slid across the highway and down a twenty-foot embankment of wet grass and head-on into a ten-inch-diameter, forty-foot-tall pine. When that replayed itself the first year after it happened it was plenty clear, plenty vivid. But it stopped after a while.

He could not remember much about the first girl he ever slept with—not her name, what she looked like, what she felt like—next to nothing. It was on an aluminum chaise in her backyard. It had been raining. She had a lot of blond hair. The memories were just tokens, words, facts, nothing sensory. And he wasn't even sure she was the one, because he remembered
another woman with red hair in an apartment—an attic apartment, it seemed like. The other girls from around that time were all similarly schematic in memory. A girl from architectural school who was from Louisiana. A girl he met at Mardi Gras in New Orleans—she was from West Texas, traveling with her mother in a white Cadillac. He was very drunk and had a cast on his arm. They picked him up in the French Quarter and took him to a motel out in Metairie. He went into the room and there were a dozen people sleeping there—mostly girls, in beds, on couches, on the floor—and the mother told him to sleep in the car. He was drunk and he did, but the girl came out and stayed with him for a while. She was faceless. How were you supposed to remember these things? What was the girl's name? She was pretty, he thought. He remembered her as pretty, though he had no memory of what she looked like.

Vaughn started cleaning up around Greta's place. He vacuumed the hardwood floor with a broom-vac, dusted some, restacked the magazines, picked up the dog's chew toys and put them in the wicker basket, and wiped the kitchen cabinets after he'd rinsed the dishes and put them in the new Bosch dishwasher that Greta was so proud of. It didn't have any dials on the face of it. The controls were on the top of the door, which closed up under the lip of the countertop.

Newton called and wondered how things were going. “What's up, Red?” he said. Sometimes Newton called him Red. It was a joke of their father's, about how people used to call their father Red when he was in college, when he had red hair. “Nothing,” Vaughn said. “You okay?”

“Sure am,” Newton said. “I got a call from Gail. She's worried about you.”

“The feeling's mutual. She tell you about her adventure?”

“Yessir,” he said. “Chapter and verse. You and the new— what, companion?—to the rescue. Hospital nights. The whole story. Just like old times. Is she okay? She said she was okay.”

“I haven't seen her since she got out,” Vaughn said. “She was a mess when she went in. I've seen worse, but only in movies.”

“She told me you were talking about our dad again.”

“He came up. Actually, she brought him up.”

“Yeah—the
proposition
. He was whacked to the end.”

“Seemed so then,” Vaughn said. “Doesn't seem so crazy now.”

“Yeah it does,” Newton said. “Really. So, anyway, uh—you need any help? Anything I can do?”

“We're fine,” Vaughn said.

“Got any work?”

“No. Well, I'm messing with a few things. I have a couple ideas that might turn into something.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Is the place still a wreck? I saw some video and it looks like nothing's happening, like nobody's doing anything since the storm.”

“That's just along the coast, here to Ocean Springs, parts of Pascagoula,” Vaughn said. “Really just the beachfront. The rest is kind of normal. Full recovery is expected anytime now. Buildings—new casinos going in. They're going to try to make it more casino-centric.”

“Bravo, Mississippi,” Newton said. “Just what was needed.”

“You could buy property down here,” Vaughn said. “Lots available.”

“Prices way too high,” Newton said. “I checked.”

“Ah.”

“Gail says she's not quite worked out the single life. She said she asked you to move in over there. You going to do that?”

“Might. We talked about it, Greta and me. For a while, maybe a few weeks or something, help Gail out.”

“Think it would?”

“I don't know. She's upset. This guy smacks her around and I don't know if that's the end of it or the first of many. So, yeah, we might do something.”

At that moment Vaughn suddenly remembered Newton's first wife. Rita. She had a red nose. She had a lot of black hair. She wore wide print skirts, very colorful. She wore socks, white. She had a red, runny nose. She had watery eyes. Her eyes bulged out of her head. Newton told him she was very smart. She graduated from Rice, he said. She had big, red lips. Rheumy eyes. Her nose was running all the time. She would blow her nose and rub her nose, and it would get red. She sat with one leg crossed under her in the big modern chairs at the house.

“Well, call me if I can help,” Newton said. “I mean, really.”

“I will,” Vaughn said. “If it spirals out of control, you'll be the first to know.”

“Okay, Vaughn,” he said. “So long.”

Years ago, when Vaughn had talks with his father, they would sit in his father's office at the house and his father would explain
things to him. It was very comfortable, and reassuring, because his father had the manner of a man who knew things, and thus Vaughn was protected. His father knew how things worked, and he told Vaughn how they worked; he explained the details, the motivations, the expectations, and the desires. At first, Vaughn was glad to get all this information, but later he resented it. He began to like his father less well, and thought his explanations lacked something in the way of subtlety, and had a curious self-aggrandizing aspect that Vaughn figured couldn't be healthy. Later still he felt sorry for his father, trapped in a life that required him to always be the hero.

When his father and mother moved into the apartment in Atlanta, they got on each other's nerves all the time, as when his father decided his mother should not take too much aspirin. They were in their eighties by then, and Vaughn's mother was in the habit of taking an aspirin every day. She may have been taking it to thin the blood, against the possibility of heart trouble—or maybe it was just to help her sleep, or for a headache she had—but in any case she would want to take one Bayer aspirin, just one, every evening, and after a time this upset his father. Vaughn never understood why. Perhaps it was her reliance on the pill. Perhaps his father thought it was some kind of pacifier, a weakness; but whatever the reason, her dependence on the aspirin upset him so much that he eventually hid the aspirin from her. He hid it in a box in the desk drawer in his home office so that she couldn't find the box; and once, when he was telling Vaughn about this, he showed Vaughn the box with the aspirin in it. He was grave about this hidden aspirin. He took Vaughn into his confidence and explained that Vaughn must never tell his mother where the aspirin were. Vaughn agreed to keep his father's secret, a
promise that he kept. But he also went to the store and bought his mother two dozen small tins of Bayer aspirin that she could take to her heart's content.

Monkey came around and Vaughn thought the dog was looking to go outside, so he went to the door and opened it, but Monkey stayed where he was; and when Vaughn asked him, “You want to go outside?” and gestured out the door, Monkey got down on all fours. Vaughn took that to mean no, and went back to the couch.

He turned on the television and caught the last half of
Engineering Disasters 10
, which included the Tropicana Casino Garage Collapse, the Transvaal Aqua Park Roof Implosion, the Metternich & Steinke Gas Storage Explosion, and the Bhopal Chemical Plant Disaster. There were a lot of workers on this show, guys in greasy overalls and hard hats, guys with walkie-talkies, guys with big electrical control boxes with big black buttons on them. He envied these guys the hard work they were doing all the time. He imagined them going home dead tired at the end of the day, physically exhausted. He wondered if he could get a job like that, maybe something simpler, but still in the same vein. Maybe a gas station job like in an old-fashioned gas station of which there were still a couple in Waveland, so that instead of sitting in Greta's house looking out the windows at the trees, the fallen leaves blowing around, the bright light, the browning grass, the dull gray of the fence, the empty lots, and now-exposed and cleaned-up slabs the other houses had rested on, he could be at a gas station making himself useful. He'd sit around and wipe his hands on those red rags, or those blue rags that some places use, and he'd have a couple of full-service pumps, so he'd have plenty of people to talk to, and he might meet some
new persons of interest, say stuff like “How're you doing?” and “Where're you headed?” and “What about this weather?” and “It's a good-looking car you've got here. What year is that?” He could do that all afternoon. He could do it for minimum wage. That wouldn't be too bad. Buy some food, some cigarettes, some alcohol. He could have a uniform—there was something wonderful about a uniform. He hadn't had a uniform since Boy Scouts. He hadn't liked the Cub Scout uniform, but the Boy Scout one was fine. He wore a uniform when he went to Catholic grade school—khakis and khaki shirt. All of the kids the same. He liked that. He missed that now. If he had a uniform it would have his name on it, or some funny name he'd make up—“Spider” or something like that on a patch over the left breast pocket, with the quotes around it. He'd have a tire gauge and a pen in his pocket, maybe a pad to write things on. He'd keep his uniforms pretty clean, but not too clean—fresh washed, but not pressed. Or maybe he'd have them done at the laundry so that they'd be stiff with starch. He thought that was the kind of thing he'd have to figure out once he got into the thing. Try one way then try another to see which he preferred. He'd have to choose his gas station carefully. He wouldn't want to be in just any gas station. Some old-fashioned gas stations are unattractive. Not much of a job for a man of his age. Certainly he could do better. He had done better, but he was never doing exactly what he wanted to do. Now and again a person should do what he wanted to.