Читать книгу Fire Ants and Other Stories - Gerald Duff - Страница 10

The Angler’s Paradise Fish-Cabin Dance of Love

Bobby Shepard smelled bad. He could tell it himself as he leaned over to push the head of the mop up under the table in the kitchen area of the fishing cabin. It was the third time he had gone back over the linoleum on the floor with a mixture of water and ammonia, and from what he could tell, not only did the dun-colored covering still look as stained and nasty as it did when he had started cleaning four hours ago, it also seemed to be dissolving at various points into small fragments from the power of the ammonia. Everything looked a whole lot more damp now, though, and he figured that was an advance.

The one-room structure did smell different, too, from the large amounts of cleaner and disinfectant and insect repellent Bobby had sloshed around, so much so that a steady stream of tears had been dripping down his cheeks for more than an hour. He paused in his mopping to rub a worn-out T-shirt across his face again, wincing as the cloth irritated his inflamed nose through which he had given up trying to breathe soon after he had started the ammonia treatment of all exposed surfaces in the house.

Despite having switched to puffing in air through his mouth, Bobby could still detect the powerful funk being thrown off in all directions from his body, and he made a mental note to pay extra special attention to deodorizing himself all over in every crease and cavity when he finished with cleaning the fish cabin and turned to the problem of personal hygiene. Bobby remembered from his youth how funny older people smelled to teenagers, anyway, even in a cleanly condition, and he was determined not to offend on the olfactory level. A good hard scrub with a mild bar soap, say Ivory, and a shampoo with a moisturing balsam-based hair product, followed by a heavy spraying of scent-free men’s deodorant—Mitchum, maybe, certainly not one of those heavy types with a musk odor—should give him good protection and make his physical aura as inoffensive as it could be, given his age location in the middle years.

No way you could hide the evidence of time’s passage, completely, of course, from the sense of smell. Bobby knew that and had to live with it. Standing in line, say, at a checkout counter in a grocery store, he might find himself waiting behind an older woman with another one with a cart behind him, pushing at him with the front end of it so she could start stacking her stuff on the conveyor belt well before it was her turn. The woman in front of him wasn’t even finished yet, and here he was with his pile of canned goods and egg plant and onions and what-have-you not even being processed yet by the checkout girl with Edna or Barb or Debbi on her nametag, and the old biddy behind was already nudging away at his butt and the small of his back with the steel edge of her carrier.

And then he would yield finally to the steady pressure of the wire shopping cart chewing away at him from the rear and take a step forward, moving despite himself into the smell-field of the woman ahead with her eyes fixed on the numbers Edna or Barb or Debbi was ringing up, as though she were watching for a signal from God about how many days she had left to live on this earth. Standing there paralyzed and rooted to the floor, that smell rising off of her saying old, old, old, no matter how much Secret or Mum or other old-lady deodorant she was using to try to mask it. All those gray years swarming and seething and working beneath the chemicals.

So smell, that was the first thing he knew he had to tackle and try to defeat when he had decided to do what he was going to do with the fishing cabin on Smith’s Point, the last one still standing on that bend of the Gulf of Mexico in the group of eight that had once been the destination of people from Port Arthur and Winnie and Orange and Port Acres and wherever else weekend fishermen used to live in the Golden Triangle of Texas.

It had been a long time ago when Arden Hooks’s Angler’s Paradise was a going concern, however. It had reached its heyday in the late fifties back before everybody from the level of apprentice oiler in a refinery on up to foreman came to own his personal boat and a pickup truck to pull it around with. As soon as the price of enough horsepower in an outboard motor to push a boat got down to where a man could buy him a rig in installments, the Angler’s Paradise on Smith’s Point was doomed. These days, you could hardly even find what was left of the old road to it anymore, especially considering what Hurricane Audrey had done to that section of the coast back in the sixties.

Bobby himself hadn’t thought of the fish camp in years, in fact, though for a while back there he had spent probably every other weekend in one of Arden Hooks’s little cabins, drinking Ancient Times bourbon at night and waiting for enough daylight to come so he could get out on the water in one of Arden’s little green boats with a twenty-five horsepower Johnson churning behind.

That experience was gone and had been gone, and it wasn’t until he had that dream that the scene of the fishing cabins clustered at the edge of the Gulf rose up before him again. But when the vision came, it arrived as though he had opened a door and discovered himself staring directly into the molten center of the sun. And it had settled into his mind like Portland cement hardening into stone. There for the centuries, no matter how high the tide rose or the wind drove or the rain beat down.

In the dream, Bobby Shepard was sitting in his BarcaLounger, the chair magically transported from his living room in Port Arthur where it always rested before the Sony Tru-Image to a new location in the center of a one-room cabin in Arden Hooks’s collection at Smith’s Point. The back of the lounger was tilted partway into the reclining option, but not so far back that Bobby was at full repose. He was relaxed, certainly, the muscles of his neck and back not needing to maintain any flex to support himself, but not kicked back so far that he was in danger of feeling the urge to drift into slumber. At ease, but alert was the way he remembered his posture as being in the opening sequence of his dream, when he went over it later in his mind and when he jotted down notes on paper so he could keep the events intact and whole against the onslaught of living in reality in the everyday world.

Music was playing at a low decibel level as the scene opened up, much like it does at the beginning of a movie after the credits have rolled by and before the real action kicks off. The performer was Jimi Hendrix, Bobby recognized immediately, but his guitar was not wailing and he was not screaming directly into the ears of his listeners as he always seemed to be doing in the clips from the music festival appearances Bobby had seen over the years on television. Instead, he was stating over and over again in a soft, deep syrupy tone, “I won’t do you no harm, I won’t do you no harm, I won’t do you no harm.”

Before Bobby Shepard, in the cleared space his BarcaLounger occupied in the fishing cabin, all eight members of the Thomas Jefferson High School Cheerleading Squad were standing in a single line, their maroon and gold pompoms shaking to one side and then the other as they spun, dipped, and twisted in elaborate dance, precisely in time and on the beat as they worked every note and nuance of Jimi’s repeated chant. Sometimes forward, sometimes back, sometimes left, sometimes right, high up, low down, but precisely together in every patterned movement, the squad of young women swayed, turned and dipped, their individual gazes burning and fixed as one on Bobby’s face as he reclined at ease in the best chair in the house.

Lulled by the insistent rhythm of Jimi Hendrix’s chant and the moist murmur of his guitar, Bobby allowed his eyes to close for a second, and when he opened them with a start, desperate not to miss a single step of the Angler’s Paradise cabin dance of the Thomas Jefferson High cheerleaders, he could count only seven of the squad still at move before him, one somehow vanished from his dream of perfect choreography.

There was no let-up from the hypnotic power of Jimi’s song, however, no matter how strongly Bobby struggled to maintain the concentration of his vision, twisting from side to side in the hold of the BarcaLounger and drawing deep draughts of air into his lungs in an attempt to fight off his doze. Inevitably, battle though he did, the lids of his eyes would slowly drift shut, and when he forced them open again at great cost to his fading energy, another of the cheerleading squad would have vanished with no evidence of her ever having taken part in the fish-cabin dance of his dream.

At last, their number had dwindled to two, a petite blonde with string-straight hair and eyes the color of an empty Coca-Cola bottle, and the other the head cheerleader with the kinky dark curls and the languid hip thrusts, each occurrence of which added a soft boom, like distant thunder over the Gulf of Mexico, to the music Jimi Hendrix played.

Bobby Shepard, with his last waning strength, began turning his hands inward and attempted to lift his arms toward his face in order to prop his eyes open physically to preserve these last two before him, but his muscles would not function and his bones would not move and the lids of his eyes slid together once more, touching closed for an instant until he forced them open briefly again by sheer will.

Left alone in single dance in the center of the fish-cabin floor was the final cheerleader, Celia Mae Adcock, her dark hair floating above her head in twisting curls, the rhythm of her movements in strict time to the increased beat and decibel count of Jimi’s wailing guitar and guttural shout.

“The last,” she said in a deep voice like that of Kathleen Turner’s in any love scene from one of her early movies, “shall be first.”

“What’s the matter, honey?” his wife Myrlie had asked in the bed beside him as Bobby sat bolt upright, groaning and shaking as though in fever chill as he tried to prize his eyes apart with both hands. “Did you have a nightmare that something was going to get you?”

“No,” Bobby had said, listening to the sound of cool air pounding through the vents of the dark bedroom and out on the Beaumont highway a clot of trucks laboring through each of their many gears. “It wasn’t no nightmare. It was just a dream, just a dream. Go on back to sleep.”

Bobby stopped mopping and straightened up, leaning a little of his weight on the wooden handle as he looked about him at the one room of the fish camp cabin. It couldn’t get any cleaner, he decided, at least on the floors and walls, not unless he used a blow-torch to sear over every surface, and he didn’t have the time or energy to try that. Or the faith, either, he considered, sniffing at first one armpit then the other. It might just set fire to everything and burn down the last cabin left still standing from the original Angler’s Paradise. Then where would he be?

The bed, though, he thought, balefully regarding the metal frame and stained mattress against the far wall of the room, now that I have to do something about, for sure. The red marks all over it are mainly just from rust coming off the frame in all this humidity over the years, and that wouldn’t bother me none to lie down on, especially with a sheet or some kind of cloth pulled up over it. But now, a young girl like that curly-headed one, she might think it was where somebody drunk or sick had nastied up the bed or something. She wouldn’t want to lie down on that, not even for a nap, whether it was covered up with a nice clean sheet or not.

“A mattress,” Bobby Shepard said out loud in the empty room, his words ringing hollow in the enclosed space. He had not spoken aloud until then, during the whole day and a half he had spent mopping and scrubbing and deodorizing and spraying for insect life in the cabin, and his own voice had become strange to him. Too loud and abrupt and a little hurried somehow in its delivery, and he thought he would try it again, this time in a lower register and at a slower rate.

“A mattress,” he said again, cocking his head to judge how what he was saying might be received by a person other than himself. “A new mattress,” he uttered, curling his lips and tongue around the words to soften and smooth their delivery. Better, at least a little bit. “With a plastic cover nobody’s ever slept on.” He tried the combination again, then a third time, and then again. By the time he had practiced making the sounds for several minutes and judging them critically as they fell upon his ear, Bobby was fairly convinced anybody who might have happened up, say outside the door of the cabin, and chanced to hear what he was saying would have believed they were listening to a regular person, who talked to other people on occasion or at least knew how to, and who was saying his piece aloud in a perfectly normal way.

He practiced for a while longer, maybe as long as half an hour, before his throat started getting tired, and he had to stop to drink some water from the gallon milk jug he had brought with him from Port Arthur. Standing near the table, his thirst slaked and the mingled odors of ammonia, Raid, and air freshener rising around him, Bobby looked slowly around the room from point to point, item to item, doorjamb to window, oil cloth to nail hole, bed frame to kerosene stove, paint fleck to water stain, from smallest detail to largest feature of the cleansed and cleared space where soon the head cheerleader of Thomas Jefferson High would be performing for him the Angler’s Paradise fish-cabin dance of love.

A seagull had made a bombing run over the new mattress tied to the top of Bobby Shepard’s Thunderbird right before the turn-off to the ruins of Arden Hooks’s Angler’s Paradise and had scored a direct hit just at the point where two lines would intersect if drawn from top to bottom and side to side of the Beauty Rest. But Bobby had chuckled to himself, unconcerned, when he saw the bird swoop and then stall above as it hovered to lay its load.

The nasty mess would have done no harm to his purchase, Bobby knew, since he had covered the mattress with clear heavy-gauge plastic taped down for the trip. The fact the gull had hit its target was nothing but further demonstration of the careful planning Bobby had put into the project and a certain sign that by thinking ahead about any and everything that might go wrong a man could make a dream a reality.

Bobby had sat down for long hours. He had pondered, he had studied, he had put questions to himself that scared him even to conceive of, much less to force himself to answer. And he had undergone this searing self-examination in the service of a final conclusion that he could only sense was somewhere out there before him, waiting like a stalled eighteen-wheeler in the middle of a one-lane road at the heart of a Gulf Coast fog bank.

But he had kept his mind in gear, he had refused to touch the clutch, and he had maintained a steady pressure on the accelerator which fed fuel to the engine of his dream.

And by so doing, he had been allowed that insight which only his gut told him was out there and which his mind could only shrink from. When the fog cleared, its last wisps of gray whipping away as though in a sudden coastal gale, the stalled eighteen-wheeler sat there not as an immobile obstacle which would rip apart the vehicle of faith and daring in which he rode. No, its rear door opened as if by signal, shining ramps extended to receive the wheels he drove, and Bobby Shepard steered his perfected Thunderbird of thought up into the protection of steel-sided and be-roofed certitude.

He knew.

And what he had come to know was this: when a man fails in the endeavor to realize his joy and hope, it is because he loses himself in the need for the goal, in the end of the accomplishment, in the love object itself. Thus his forgetfulness, his ignoring of details, his slighting of process and way. Thus his doom; thus his loss.

And it was this reasoning that led Bobby Shepard to put to himself the painful questions, the second-guessing of every decision, the humbling of himself before the smallest and grossest of each material detail, the learning of and the discipline to a deep patience.

If he had had the space of weeks, days and hours commensurate to the depth of his devotion, Bobby would have spent a year deciding on the brand of mattress alone. He would have driven to Houston to Mattress Warehouse Discounters simply to compare colors and coil count. He would have flown to New Orleans to browse the aisles of Maison Blanc for designer sheets and pillow cases, to Dallas to shop for dust ruffles at Neiman Marcus.

But Bobby Shepard lived on a Pure Oil gauger’s salary in this world and in the Golden Triangle of Texas with its side streets and the driveways to many of its dwellings still made of oyster shells, its sidewalks unpaved except right downtown where no one ever went anymore anyway, and its atmosphere a rich brew of congeners, carcinogens, humidity, and high levels of ozone. The air much of the time looked faintly blue. It smelled tartly addictive. In the summer, a rain shower came each day for thirty minutes, beginning precisely at two o’clock in the afternoon, except during hurricane season when all schedules became irregular and nothing could be counted on.

Steam would rise for an hour from the pavement of the streets and all flat surfaces and roof tops, after each shower had ended, and to a person caught outside during the rain, the water felt as warm as a hot bath, and did not refresh.

Therefore, Bobby Shepard shopped at the Wal-Mart on Oleander Boulevard in Port Arthur for all that was needful to prepare the last remaining fish cabin at Angler’s Paradise at Smith’s Point for its true and fit purpose. The choice of name-brand products there was wide and varied, and it was from this stock he chose that which would be visible to a consumer. The Beauty Rest Magic Coil. The floral sheets with matching pillow case. The ruffled window dressings. The stressed-polyethylene patio chair, collapsible and imprinted with representations of hermit crabs and tiny sea horses. The case of Classic Coke in small bottles. The canned ham from Denmark. The four-pack of herbal-flavored Pringle’s chips. The quart jar of fat-free salad dressing. The box of floral-print Kleenex tissue.

It was only with the products not evident to the eye that Bobby stinted. And these he purchased not solely with a view toward economy. The cleaning materials, the insecticides, the room deodorizers, the oils and polishes, all these Bobby subjected to a nose wary and experienced in the manufacture of chemical vehicles, reagents and catalysts, and none was selected, regardless of cost, unless its appropriateness and potency was certified by sense of smell. If it did not speak of origin in a prime first-run barrel, the unguent, ointment, stripping agent, buffing compound, color enhancer or anti-coagulant was passed over, no matter how cheap its price or minor its mission in the transformation of the last standing structure at Smith’s Point into the Angler’s Paradise Fish-Cabin of Love.

Bobby shifted down to first gear to maneuver the Thunderbird around a water-filled hole in the road ahead, leaning forward to peer closely at its edge as he approached. One of the few times he had driven the one-lane shell road on a supply trip during the first week, he had let the right front wheel come too close to a similar hole and had dropped what felt like over a foot, bringing the car to a lurching stop. He was afraid he might have broken a tie rod, but hadn’t, luckily, and he had learned from the experience not to trust anything on Arden Hooks’s abandoned road that was covered with water.

Managing to miss this hole, he steered toward the center of the road and felt a twinge in his back just above his right kidney area as he removed his hand from the gear shift knob. No way he could sit in the bucket seat that it didn’t hurt him.

He had to give her credit, he thought to himself. Celia Mae Adcock had caught him with one hell of a kick, even though it was through the seat back itself and therefore cushioned from most of its force. It was the heavy-toed shoes she wore, he knew, and the fact that she exercised all the time to be able to cheerlead that accounted for the lasting effect he was suffering.

It was a good thing the drug, whatever the capsules were his wife kept in large amounts in the medicine cabinet, had begun phasing in so strongly when it did. Otherwise, the head cheerleader of Thomas Jefferson High might have kicked him in the small of his back so hard and so often on the trip from Port Arthur that his kidneys would’ve been permanently damaged. Might’ve ended up making water through a tube run up into his privates long before old age put him into a nursing home with all the attachments they hooked up to you in a place like that.

It was just the one good one she had got off, though, he thought, looking through the rearview mirror into the backseat where she lay snoring and pretty much covered up by a silver-colored ground cloth purchased from Wal-Mart. Before she got groggy enough from that medicine to doze on off and stop all that lamming and jerking and kicking around was when she had landed it. And curse? Lord God, where did a beautiful young girl like that dressed up in a maroon and gold cheerleading costume learn all those bad words she had called him?

Actually, Bobby considered, as he drove on at a steady, though slow, pace through the afternoon sun toward the fish camp, he did know all the nouns she had used. He had heard them delivered in his direction before lots of times. It was the modifiers, as Old Lady Chambliss had called them back in senior English class, that had puzzled him after she had gotten into the Thunderbird and begun to feel sleepy. Asshole, O.K. Cocksucker, yes. Shithead, naturally. But what was a rimjobbing such and such? What did it mean when somebody called you poncified?

She couldn’t have learned all those bad words off of TV. Bobby had cable, the extended sixty-four channel package, and he looked at each and every one of them, late night, that might show naked women with men or with other women and even once out of an open-access outlaw deal in Matamoros, Mexico, two women with a small donkey and a border collie. They never talked much, anyway, the people working on each other on those shows. They just tended to business, got the job done and never looked up.

Maybe that stuff she knew how to say Celia Mae Adcock had picked up from having to go to school with blacks or Chicanos or Hispanics or whatever they called themselves these days, and it was not really the language a squad of cheerleaders would use among themselves. Bobby hoped not. He hated to think of girls that looked the way they did, their hair all washed and shining and springy and their skin like brand new, freshly extruded latex just out of the machine, standing around in their costumes calling their boyfriends rimjobbing cool dudes and primo slitlappers.

It was a puzzle, and it was deeply bothering to Bobby, that kind of language, dropping from those lips, and he shook his head hard as though to clear it of such profanity as he drove the Thunderbird down the narrow track between the banks of palmetto and sawgrass and scrub pine.

Two more hard rights, he told himself, then that little swale and another half-mile, and I’ll be able to see the water and we’ll be there, me and her in the backseat in her cheerleader’s outfit with the applique megaphone and the four gold stars sewed on it to show she’s the head one. She’s Celia Mae Adcock. She stands in the middle of all of them and starts up every yell by clapping her hands together three times and saying all by herself while the rest of the cheerleaders wait, “O.K.,” clap clap, “Let’s go.”

Bobby stood breathing hard in the middle of the one-room cabin, winded after all he’d been doing: untying the mattress on the roof of the Thunderbird, getting it inside the building and its plastic covering all taken off, laying it as fairly square as possible on the bedstead (The frame was not a standard size. He had been afraid of that.), placing the floral sheets on the mattress and the case on the pillow and using a hospital tuck to get everything smooth and tight, wrestling the snoring Celia Mae Adcock up and out of the backseat of the car and walking her inside to lie down on the mattress and sheets as the first person ever to touch them in their role as a bed, unloading everything else from the trunk of the car and putting these things where they belonged with the rest of the stuff already there in the fish cabin, and finally looking around him in a slow revolution as he turned at the center to face each aspect of the scene of his creation in its proper and duly appointed place.

He wanted a cigarette. Bad. But he would deny himself that reward, as he had been doing for the entire week before this day, not knowing what Celia Mae Adcock’s response might be to the smell of smoke on his clothes and person, much less the reek of smoker’s breath.

He knew she hadn’t noticed him or his hygenic condition or anything else in her fish-cabin surroundings as she walked in earlier from the Thunderbird, through the door and toward the pristine Beauty Rest waiting in the middle of the room. She had moved like a drunk being led to a bathroom to puke, her eyes half-closed and her mouth semi-open as though poised in anticipation of action to come, not resisting his aid in her progress at all. In fact, Bobby had been touched by the way she leaned against his shoulder as she proceeded, lifting her feet an extra amount as if she were being presented with a series of eight-inch high wooden blocks she had to step over in her path, though he knew, of course, it was the drug working and not Celia Mae Adcock being friendly on purpose that had led her to accept his help and guiding hand.

As he sat in the plastic lawn chair worked with the hermit crab and sea horse design, watching her lie on her back with her arms perfectly straight down by her sides and listening to her snore at the ceiling, Bobby considered how all events had conspired so well back at Drake’s Drive Inn. He still couldn’t believe how everything had come together at a little after three o’clock in the afternoon, each part joining up with the one next to it as though machined and polished by a master tool pusher in a Texaco lab.

There was a lesson in it for the thoughtful man, and Bobby promised himself there in the fish cabin where Celia Mae Adcock herself lay dreaming in the full costume of maroon and gold that at a later time when he was calm and unflustered and conditions were right he would figure on this conjunction of events and puzzle out what the larger meaning might be. He owed it to himself to understand. Never before had the details of an event in his life seemed to speak to him in one voice, and he would be a fool not to listen. Maybe if he could comprehend this one thing and how it came to be, he could know how to do next time, get a streak going, find a pattern that worked and just lay it over the rest of his life like a template.

Why, for example, had it come to him that very morning to take apart the blue and yellow capsules in Myrlie’s medicine cabinet, pour their granulated contents into a plastic baggie and stick it in his shirt pocket? He hadn’t planned that. It just announced itself to him when he saw the label on the bottle picturing a woman sleeping on a cloud bank with a big smile on her face.

Then, after his shift ended at the refinery and he had gotten in his forty hours for the week, and was off for seventy-two, Bobby had decided to choose that afternoon to pick up the Beauty Rest and transport it to Smith’s Point. That very afternoon. A real hot day, such a scorcher he had felt like he needed to stop by Drake’s Drive Inn on the way out of town for a big cup of root beer slush, which he could have just as well picked up at some place on the coast highway itself, and not had to go out of the way to Drake’s to get it. But he hadn’t done that, even though he had been afraid somebody might have seen him parked at Drake’s with the mattress tied to the roof of the Thunderbird and started giving him shit about it. Jess Hardy, maybe, or Toppy LeBlanc, stopping by for a shrimp burger or ice cream cone after their shifts and catching him looking like a Mexican on moving day with furniture tied to his car top.

But Bobby had chanced it, run the risk of being hoorawed by dumbshits, all because of his loyalty to Drake’s, the watering hole of his youth and the hangout of Thomas Jefferson High kids for over forty years, and it had paid off, just as though another of the smoothly polished parts of the machine under construction had clicked snugly into place as he drove up, thirsty for his root beer slush.

Because there she was, in full costume. Her lower lip was stuck out, she was jiggling a set of keys in her hand as though she was trying to decide whether or not to throw them up against some wall, and her mass of black curls was floating above her head with a life of its own.

Bobby Shepard felt a sudden jump in the middle of his chest like a small thing afraid, but he pulled the Thunderbird in beside the Buick anyway, marveling at how his hands knew to kill the engine, put the transmission into Park and engage the emergency brake all on their own without his having to tell them a single step in the operation. “Hello there,” he heard himself saying out the driver’s window. “Where’s the rest of your outfit?”

Still jiggling her keys, Celia Mae Adcock turned her head slowly and looked at Bobby as though she had just been spoken to by one of the two-by-fours supporting the roof overhang of Drake’s Drive Inn or by a double order of fried onion rings.

“You’re looking at it, mister,” she said deliberately. “That’s all there is.”

“No, no,” Bobby said, shocked and apologizing, “I didn’t mean what you’re wearing, your cheering outfit you got on. I was talking about the other girls, the rest of the TJ cheerleaders. Them other ones.”

He stopped talking, but his lips continued to move in a series of dry clicks as he tried desperately to think of another way to identify the people he meant by the use of spoken language. “The ones,” he said, “the ones you got to tell how to do when y’all are out there on the field.”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Celia Mae Adcock said, shifting her clump of keys to the other hand. “They knew to meet me at Drake’s, but you can see they’re not here.”

“No,” Bobby said, carefully looking up and down the whole range of the front structure of the building as though the seven missing girls in the maroon and gold of TJ High might have managed to conceal themselves successfully on the premises, maybe behind the menu board, and were about to jump out and yell surprise at him. “I sure don’t see a one of them.”

“And this old car of Daddy’s won’t start back up,” Celia Mae said, “because the battery’s dead or something, and I haven’t got a cent of money with me to call him, and Heather’s supposed to have brought me my purse.”

“Huh,” Bobby said, thinking to himself that the madder Celia Mae got the more her hair seemed to want to puff up and swell over her forehead. It looked to him two inches higher than when he’d first pulled the Thunderbird up under the Drake’s Drive Inn service shed.

“Listen,” he said, wondering what he was about to say to the head cheerleader, “I’ll loan you a quarter to call your daddy, and while you’re doing that I’ll buy you a root beer. I’ll be glad to.”

“Make it a diet Sprite,” Celia Mae said, sticking out her hand toward the window of the Thunderbird, “with extra ice. Large.”

As Bobby stood by the serving window of Drake’s and watched Celia Mae Adcock work the pay phone at the far corner of the parking lot, the gold satin of her cheerleader’s underpants softly shining beneath the maroon of her skirt as it broke over her high-set behind, he could feel the plastic baggie full of dope for sleeping give a little jerk in his shirt pocket. Moving in tiny fits and starts from one side of its enclosure to the other, the baggie rubbed against his chest hairs hard enough to make them tickle as though a drop of sweat was rolling down from his collarbone toward his left nipple.

“Which one of these drinks,” he said hoarsely to the woman waiting on the other side of the counter for her money, “is the diet Sprite?”

“Why, what do you think?” she said in a cross voice. “The clear-looking one, of course. The one that ain’t root beer.”

“Thank you,” Bobby Shepard had breathed, turning reverently toward the car with the plastic-wrapped Beauty Rest mattress tied to it, the drink cups held before him like chalices and the plastic baggie moving in a slow squirm in the pocket above his heart. “Oh, thank you.”

He had thought the worst time would be when she first came to, there on the Beauty Rest covered with the floral sheets, and that if she was going to lose it completely it would be then and there at that first moment she opened her eyes and saw where she was. Not riding along in a vintage Thunderbird sipping at a large diet Sprite and ice and starting to feel so sleepy she couldn’t hold her head up, but lying on her back in a one-room fish cabin looking up at the ceiling where dirt-dauber wasps had put mud nests in every corner and along the sills of each window right up to the edge of where the wood ran out.

Bobby Shepard hadn’t even noticed the clumps of gray mud hardened into a material as tough as concrete until he was sitting in the plastic chair worked with a sea horse and crab design waiting for Celia Mae Adcock to rouse from her nap, and he would have sworn he had cleaned every surface of the cabin thoroughly. That’s what comes of just looking down at the floor and worrying about mopping it, he had thought to himself, instead of lifting up your eyes once in a while to see what might be above head-level. Too late to do anything about it now, he had concluded, but one thing was comfortingly for sure: Celia Mae Adcock wouldn’t get her feet dirty from walking on the floor, wood or linoleum part either. Bobby had scrubbed it to a state of sterility.

But he had been mistaken in his dread of the instant when the head cheerleader of Thomas Jefferson High would wake from her doze and realize the strangeness of where she was and undoubtedly start screaming and crying in stark terror, convinced that great harm was about to come to her from the man sitting in the light blue high-impact plastic chair with the sea creature motif worked all through its surface.

He had anticipated the look Celia Mae would have on her face. Horror, fear, unreason, all mixed up into a compound announcing her intention to break from the hold of the Beauty Rest and run in any direction. What might slow her down, he had asked himself, and delay her going so mad with fear she wouldn’t be able to listen to any calming words or assurances from him, but just simply flee for the outdoors like something caught in the woods, run into the walls like a trapped bird?

Bobby Shepard thought long, he thought hard, he turned on a battery-powered boom box programmed to play the same song over and over as Celia Mae lay in her stupor, lost in the drug-induced dreams of a head cheerleader of one of the most powerful high schools in the Golden Triangle of Texas. That musical offering, purring away in the tape drive, was Engelbert Humperdinck singing “Delilah” again and again directly into her ear.

Surely, Bobby felt, that hymn to the mystery and power of a woman able to conquer the strongest man in the Holy Bible would feed into Celia Mae’s unconscious mind, delivered as only Engelbert could bring it, and soak into her head a message of appreciation and awe for the kind of prime high school senior she was. It would show her, even while she was asleep against her will, the nature and depth of feeling the man who had captured her and brought her to the fish cabin was capable of. Whether she was interested in that fact or even cared to know it, she would have to hear it. Engelbert, chanting his tribute to her kind of woman over and over, would bring it on home.

When Celia Mae woke up, she woke up fast. Her eyes popped open, she sat up in bed, the brand new floral sheet cascading from off her uniformed chest to reveal the maroon and gold applique of megaphone, stars and bright letters, and she put both hands to her head and began to fluff her hair.

“What,” she said, looking not toward Bobby in his chair or about her at the one-room space of the fish cabin, but at the boom-box beside her pouring forth “Delilah,” “is that shit on the radio?”

“Engelbert,” Bobby said, swallowing hard and instinctively tensing to run toward the door should Celia Mae suddenly come flying at him with her fingernails held out, “Engelbert Humperdinck.”

“Is that a name?” Celia Mae said, still working at her hair with both hands to get out the tangles and the telltale signs of bed-head. “Or something you’d call a retard?”

“He’s a vocal stylist,” Bobby said, still poised on the edge of the sea horse and crab chair, enough so that the plastic was cutting into the underside of his thighs. It would leave deep red marks, he knew, and it was already putting his feet to sleep. “He does what they call romantic ballads. Or did. He might be dead by now, I don’t know.”

“Right,” Celia Mae said. “Sure. Where’s the eject?” She leaned over the edge of the bed and began punching buttons on the boom box, hiking up her cheerleading sweater as she turned to do so, high enough that Bobby could see a flash of bare skin. Something twisted a little somewhere deep in his belly, and he felt as though a meal he had really wanted when he was eating it was announcing now that it might be deciding to come back up.

“It’s got a mark on it,” he said. “It says E on top of the button.”

Now Celia Mae Adcock was examining the Engelbert Humperdinck cassette and reading the words on its label out loud. “Engelbert Sings Tom Jones: Smoky Bars and Dark Cabarets. Now who’s this one? Tom Jones. He must be using a consumed name.”