Island, p.29
Island, page 29
The shadow spoke: “He’s over here.” God’s voice at last; he could understand it. It sounded like someone he knew. He opened his mouth to ask God to step out of the sun, but no sound came out.
God knelt down next to him, shrinking to Lou Mendoza size, and spoke again: “What’s the matter, Fred? You all right?”
He looked at Lou. He couldn’t speak. His throat was closed. His swollen tongue filled his mouth.
Lou’s face came and went. He earnestly desired to speak to him, and to Marge, whose face appeared too. But he couldn’t.
“He’s alive?”
“Course he’s alive. See him breathing. We’ve got to get him ashore.”
Lou picked him up. “Phew,” he said. “He’s shat himself.”
In the boat Marge asked: “What’s wrong with him?”
“Christ only knows. I’ll take him out to the house, get him cleaned up. You get the doctor.”
“Wawa.” He had been working on that word for quite a while and finally got it out. Marge gave him some in a paper cup. It felt its way around his tongue, partially ungluing it. Some went down his throat. She gave him more. Swallowing was hard. The water was cold. He was cold.
At the marina, Lou asked: “Can you walk?”
“Try.”
They supported him to the truck, his legs going through the motions like an injured football player’s. Marge disappeared. Lou carried him into his house and ran a hot bath while he stripped him of his clothes.
“Jesus Christ, you stink, do you know that, Fred?”
He knew.
“How come three shirts? Do you know you’re wearing three shirts and three undershirts? Three pair of pants?”
“Cold.”
Lou lifted him into the tub. The water was hot, but he continued to shiver. He sank down so that the water would run into his mouth. He tried to swallow a little.
“Hey, not that. Let me give you a glass of clean.”
“Hot.”
“Okay, hot. But not that bathwater. Jesus, Fred, you just don’t know how dirty you are.” Lou got down on his knees and began lathering and scrubbing him. “Got to get some of that stink off of you before the doctor comes, else he might not stay. Here.” He handed him the soap and washcloth. “You do your own butt.”
He did what he could.
“Now I’m gonna run this water out and put in some fresh. This here’s too dirty. You lay right where you are.”
He hated to feel that water go, but more, even hotter, replaced it. It was just beginning to get to him when Marge returned with a doctor. He felt too sleepy and comfortable, just on the edge of being warm, to be embarrassed by the three of them looking down at him in the tub.
“We found him sitting by his house,” Lou explained. “He was wearing two, three sets of everything. He couldn’t talk.”
“Where’s his clothes now?” asked Marge.
“I thrun them out back. They stunk.”
The doctor took his temperature and pulse, told him to open his mouth, examined his sausage of a tongue, listened to his heart. “Can you talk?” he asked.
“Yes,” he said. It came out “yeth.”
“What happened to you?”
“I jutht—” He was too tired to tell him.
The doctor straightened up and said to the others: “There doesn’t seem to be anything the matter with him except exposure and severe dehydration. He has a lot of scratches on him, but they don’t seem to be infected.”
“What do we do with him?”
“Except that he may be mentally disturbed. He might be better off in a hospital.”
“No,” he said. Here was where he wanted to be.
“You understand what we’re saying, Fred?” Lou raised his voice as if insane people were hard of hearing.
He nodded.
“So what do we do with him?”
“Keep putting liquids into him. Juices. Chicken broth. I’ll stop by tomorrow afternoon to see how he is. Keep him in bed.”
“How about getting to the crapper?”
“If he can. Although he might be better off in a hospital.”
“I want to thtay here.” Proud of that long sentence.
“Fred, you hear me?” Lou shouted. “You think you can? I’m gonna put you in Davey’s room.” He hoisted him out of the tub, set him on the toilet seat, and dried him off more or less. He then put a work shirt on him and hauled him to his feet. “Now let’s see you walk into Davey’s room. It’s across the hall.”
He made it. A small room. Marge had sheets on the bed and was putting on a blanket.
“I got to go now,” she said. “Opening time.”
She left. The doctor left. Lou put a pitcher of water and a glass by the bed, also an open can of tomato juice. He put a pink plastic bucket under the bed. “Just in case.” Then Lou left. He lay on his back, with his eyes closed. He was able to move his tongue around in his mouth now, and he did so gratefully. From time to time he took a sip of water or tomato juice. He kept drifting off to sleep. Pure heaven. He was warm and clean. After a while the liquids began to move through him. At first he used the bucket. Later he went to the bathroom. He took the bucket with him and rinsed it out carefully.
He had time to become acquainted with Davey, but he didn’t learn much. There was a photograph of a high school baseball team on the wall, but he didn’t know which one was Davey. Davey didn’t come into his room all that day or night. Apparently he wasn’t around. His closet, except for a very old pair of Keds, was empty. So was his bureau, empty and dusty. So was the room, empty and dusty. He prowled shakily around it and looked out the window, which faced the back where the trucks were parked. Whenever he heard anybody coming he got back into bed, now extremely conscious of his shirttail nakedness. When Marge walked in with a pile of his clothes he was vastly relieved to see them.
“Took them to the laundromat yesterday,” she said. “Those green and yellow pants are pretty fancy. Linen. Lou wanted to throw them out, but I knew they would wash up good. Why’n’t you put something on and come into the kitchen. I’m making hotcakes.”
He ate the hotcakes, forcing himself to do it slowly. Still thirsty, he followed with a glass of water, but now it went down easily into a system whose gates and sluices were open and flowing. He felt weak but well. In his own clothes, rumpled but fresh and clean. It was wonderful to feel clean.
“I went and got your gun,” Lou said. “Looked around. Nothing else seemed worth taking. Fred, you left an awful mess.”
“You’re the one to talk,” said Marge.
“I put a padlock on your door and latched the windows. Won’t nobody go out there till spring anyway. Brought your dory. It’s in the marina now, but we’ll put it in the yard over the winter.”
“I guess he could stand one more hotcake,” said Marge.
“So what the hell happened to you?”
He had been trying to prepare himself for that. Wondering what to say, not quite sure himself what had happened (at least, why), not sure of their role, not at all sure they would comprehend their importance to him, assuming he could articulate it. It might be simpler not to mention their part at all, but here he was, with them. “I guess I just ran down,” he said.
“You done worse. You come to a dead stop.”
“I got lonely.”
“I would think,” said Marge. “Why didn’t you come to town?”
“I ran out of gas.”
“You could row in.”
“I ran out of food.” How could he explain the running out of will? “I got sick. I got weak.” He bit his lip. “Anyway, there was nobody here to come to.”
“Ain’t you friendly with Charlie Barker? You were always going to his place,” said Lou.
That surprised him. “How did you know that?”
“People around here know everything. They know you’re here now, I guess. And I guess they know Marge moved in when you did.”
“You moved in?” he asked.
“Supposed to be looking out for you; that’s what I said. But people suppose she’s looking out for me.”
“Let them suppose,” she said.
“They won’t be supposing Fred.”
She just smiled at him.
Lou was persistent. “So what really happened?”
“Leave him alone. He’s weak.”
“I want to know.”
“You didn’t come back. I waited for you.” He got it out, but it seemed woefully inadequate.
“Come back?” said Marge.
“I asked you back, remember. You never came.”
“What difference …? We couldn’t. I mean—”
“Tell him,” said Lou.
“I mean, we were split up, like, for a while.”
“She means I finally thrun out my no-good brother. You see his empty room you’re in? It’s empty because I finally thrun him out. So what does he do? He goes in to the Blue Lobster and loads up and charges it to me. And she lets him.”
“So he isn’t speaking to me. So what am I supposed to do, sit around? So I, you know, go on a date. So what does he do? He hits me.”
Lou helped himself to more hotcakes. “She knew better than that.”
“Gave me a black eye. I was ashamed to go anywhere.” She touched the place. There was still a faint smudge there.
“Just a love tap, Fred. She bruises easy. Nothing to the one I laid on you. And then she won’t speak to me for a week.”
“What do you expect? Hit first, think later.”
Lou’s grin widened. “And here are the two busted heads eating hotcakes in my kitchen. Goes to show. Bust heads, make friends. How you feeling, Fred? Maybe if you ate it real slow, you could handle another.”
He shook his head. The same affection that he had felt on the beach was welling up again and would make eating anything impossible. And control of his lower lip impossible. He got up and went into Davey’s room.
Why hadn’t he come to them? Always waiting for the other person to make the move. Though he couldn’t trust people to make good moves. They always seemed to make bad ones. Except they didn’t always. Here they didn’t. So it wasn’t just them. It had to be himself. Something whizzed through his mind (from Hennerkop?), and he tried to hang on to it. If you felt good about yourself, good enough to take risks with yourself, then you might get something back. He’d risked with Lou, even though he’d been frightened of him. He had gone back with the frying pans, never mind the reason. He had risked another punch in the jaw and risked drinking with him. On the beach he had risked letting both of them know he was fond of them.
So why hadn’t he come to them? Because he couldn’t believe that they might be fond of him.
What did it take to prove that? Did they have to save his life? He really ought to go back into the kitchen and let them know how fond he was of them regardless of how they felt. Put his arms around them—and then they would really think he was crazy. He would have to learn to watch people more carefully. Not in the old way, to protect himself. He would have to learn to let people know he was fond of them without alarming them. After all, other people might be just as frightened of closeness and displays of emotion as he had been. Look more closely for that instead of always looking at himself.
Look at himself. There was no mirror in Davey’s room, so he slid across the hall to the bathroom. There he looked at himself, trying to see something human that other humans might respect and love. It had to be there. At this moment he felt so generous with himself that he knew it had to be. He stared into his own eyes, trying to see through the pupils, into the black behind them, to something that was floundering back in there. Here he was, approaching forty, staring at himself in a mirror and for the first time in his life getting a glimpse of what he might be. He didn’t have to throw his arms around them, but he could nourish the feeling he had for them, and he could find ways of letting them know. If he was too stupid for that, he deserved to freeze.
Lou was still eating hotcakes. He had a gargantuan appetite.
“You saved my life, you know.”
“Well
“You did.”
“Okay, okay.”
“How did you happen to go out there?”
“Bill Nunes, the one in the post office. I was in there one day, and he said: You still fishing? And I said yes. And he said: Do you ever fish around Sheep Island? And I said yes. And then he said he was wondering about you because you had mail piling up. I got to thinking maybe you’d busted a leg or something, so I grabbed Marge and went.”
“I studied nursing,” she explained. “Why didn’t you come to town?”
Say it. Say it. “Because there’s nobody here.” Go on. The important thing. “I mean, who feels about me the way you do about each other.” He willed himself to look at them, first him, then her. She put a hand on Lou’s with an expression that gutted him utterly. His tears: he simply could not control them.
“He’s still weak,” she said, getting up and putting an arm around him, her breasts broad across his shoulders.
“I told you we should have brought someone better than Emily,” Lou said.
Lou’s house was a bungalow, with a kitchen, living room, bathroom, and two bedrooms. It was furnished simply in imitation Colonial maple. One pattern of chintz everywhere. Apparently he had furnished his entire house with a single purchase of matching everything. Marge had succeeded in cleaning up the kitchen. Now she was attacking the living room. Lou sprawled on the sofa, watching her.
“How about Doris?” he said.
“Doris? You have to be out of your mind.”
“Who, then?”
“Who, nobody. Give him a chance to get his strength back. Let him get out of the house and around town a little.”
He borrowed the dry mop from Marge and cleaned out Davey’s room and closet. Even that little job was tiring. He would do the bureau tomorrow. If they let him stay.
P a r t T h r e e
LEAVING THERE
28
FRED, CAN YOU DRIVE A TRUCK?”
“I can drive a car.”
“Same thing. I got a lot of hauling jobs stacked up. Simple jobs, but they take somebody. If it wasn’t for that son-of-a-bitching brother of mine, I wouldn’t be shorthanded.”
He became a truckdriver, ashamed of his weakness. He took it as carefully and slowly as he could, concealing the trembling, and gradually it went away. He hauled loads of dirt, sand, cinder block, trash—whatever had to be hauled. When Lou was satisfied that he was skillful enough to negotiate the narrow back streets and driveways of Lincoln Harbor, he put him on a garbage run he had developed. By that time Fred was strong enough to lift full garbage cans. He was paid fifty dollars a week.
“I should be paying you back something for my room and board.”
“Okay, ten bucks. It ain’t costing me more. Marge don’t mind your being here.”
“You’re sure?”
“You got her here, Fred. She wouldn’t move in here before you came. When we wanted to be together, like, she would sneak in when she got through work. Trouble was sneaking out again. She never liked that. One thing, she don’t like to get up early. Another thing, even at six there’s probably somebody up someplace. I’d leave the truck right next to the kitchen door so’s she could jump right in. But she always had the feeling that somebody would see her and say there goes that Marge Kenney humping that Lou Mendoza again.”
“Where does she live?”
“Except that she don’t say humping. That’s my dirty tongue again. Live? She was living across town in a trailer with Doris Fane. But she don’t like Doris’s ways. Thinking of moving anyway. You needing care, that got her here. While I was out working, she’d sit here. Says you slept most of the time. She filled your water pitcher, kept an eye on you.”
He had little recollection of that service but was filled with gratitude. “I want to tell you again. You two …”
“Forget it.”
Make sure he knew. “I don’t want to forget it. I owe you a lot. If you ever …”
“Okay, okay. Right now just keep working. We got work stacked up to get done before frost.”
Each morning he got up at six-thirty and made his own breakfast, also a sandwich and a thermos of coffee for his lunch. During breakfast he got the day’s instructions from Lou. The hardest part was learning the different places he had to go. Sometimes the man he was supposed to meet wouldn’t be there. He made sure he knew where Lou would be during the day so that he could check with him to find out what he might do instead.
“That’s good, Fred. Davey would have just goofed off.”
He would bring the truck back to Lou’s house at five. Marge would have a hot supper ready, and the three of them would eat it in the kitchen. Just before six she would leave for her job at the Blue Lobster. After supper he did the dishes, while Lou sprawled on the sofa with a cigar, expansive and disposed to talk. But he was usually so tired that he couldn’t listen to Lou. Most nights he was asleep by eight. He never heard Marge come in.
There was a double bed in Lou’s room. Weekdays that door was shut in the morning. Consequently, except for suppers, the only time he saw Marge was on Sunday, when nobody worked and the three of them ate a large late leisurely breakfast together. Marge had a generous soft figure. She moved deliberately and with careful regard for her movements. It was as if she had learned this from watching voluptuous women in the movies. She was conscious of men’s eyes on her. She caught Lou’s as she went about the house. She enjoyed being watched by him, soliciting and getting occasional pats and swats as she brushed by him. Fred felt that she also welcomed his eyes on her, and he would have been made uncomfortable about that if she hadn’t been so open about it. She would sway out of the kitchen and stand in the doorway, her hip cocked, frankly enjoying being admired. There was a glow of femaleness about her all the time. She seemed to be saying: “Here I am. I know I’m desirable. In fact, I’m proud of it. So look at me and enjoy yourself. Whatever you succeed in imagining about me won’t be as warm as the truth.” If there were women in the world who appeared to promise much, she was one.
