Читать книгу Now Silence - Tori Warner Shepard - Страница 15

Even when she slept, she felt observed. Hidden eyes watched her as she made pin curls of her profuse red hair. Gossips screeched about her as she smoothed her hands over her breasts beneath her lime-colored silk nightgown. The town wags picked her to shreds. Russell heard them and bought her French gowns and silk stockings, not for her birthday, but just because… He was a gentleman. His final gesture had been the house.

“I had no idea about it,” she’d said. In his new will, she was the residual beneficiary.

“He did it secretly without my knowledge.” But she had known. He’d told her he was thinking of doing this. Reminding him of it was tedious, but her timing had been good. Any more delay and she’d have been right back where she’d started, grateful for a desk job in Dawson Creek.

She knew how Anissa reviled her. Ahh, Anissa had the Sword of Saint Germain up her ass! Bloody woman! Still legally married, she’d been his primary beneficiary and had retained her huge house on the lake, plus the war bonds and the lumber camp. That camp might have been Phyllis’ anchor-to-windward. She would have kept it and sold the Florida place when the goddamned war was over and the going prices for winter homes bounced back. In its way, Dawson Creek was more like Scotland—without her horrid family.

Florida was too dull for her—too much selfishness and trivia. The rich winter people flooded south from the Industrial Giants, fencing themselves off against the prehistoric, bigoted Floridians. They came mindlessly hating all the Niggers and Cubanos who had the bad luck to occupy that flat swampy peninsula, appended as it was to the United States like an uncircumcised penis.

They certainly never came for each other, for they caviled and complained against each other as well—they only came for the sea which was exquisite. The sea, as it washed over the reefs, its color turned green, like her own green eyes. And it stretched out as a beckoning thoroughfare before her, past Greenland and on to a heroic welcome in Aberdeen, and the newly enlightened Scots. Scotland always welcomed prodigals with money in their pockets. It would again.

She paused in her assessment. If her mother apologized, must she forgive her? Phyllis knew darkly that as a baptized Christian she was obliged to offer forgiveness to any bloody creep who was contrite. But forgetting? She might never forget, who could? Who would not harbor ill feelings? However, if her mother’s apology was sincere, Phyllis would be required to extend some form of moral forgiveness to her puritanical mum. The whole dark and starving neighborhood was puritanical, drawing the line across sex, nothing else.

No line through drinking yourself into a foul humor every night and when the small matter of Phyllis’ being fugged by her history teacher was found out, they all went berserk. That such a small pleasure was blown out of proportion pointed out how stuffy and intolerant Scotland was. Here in the States it has been her experience that you had plenty of permission to sleep around but not with a Negro. Being high-minded, she found that a failing.

The ground was still fresh on Russell’s grave when she had called his sister, Doris, for reassurance about her inheritance. And Doris gave it readily, insisting that Phyllis keep the money, even implied—of all things— that she’d earned it. She used the word, services.

“Try to forget about Anissa. Just keep what was given to you and be glad. It’s rightfully yours.” So Phyllis accepted what Russell had wanted her to have and tried not to fancy that the lumber camp should have been hers as well.

Money became her; it seemed to make her brainier even though she thought she had been endowed with sufficient and amazing attributes. So she dressed the part of a widow—ring, pearls, hair done, high heels. Still, no one telephoned. No one wrote notes to her. The mail she received was on legal-sized paper with letterheads and rosters of associates’ names, some dead, some still living.

The neighbors had forgotten their courtesy.

Phyllis’ heart rushed when a personal letter in her Aunt Marjorie’s tight penmanship finally arrived, asking after her well being and sending months-old news from Aberdeen. Her aunt in Santa Barbara again encouraged her to come and stay. “Yes, I’d be more than happy to find you a place here. I’m so sorry to hear about Russell’s passing over. I know that you were fond of him.” Phyllis, with a three-minute egg timer placed by the phone, called to thank her for being such a brick and to lay out her plans.

“Family is family!” Marjorie exclaimed. “I hate to take up time on an expensive call but you must hear me out. Your plan is absolutely daft. You’ll not make it even the first quarter of the way.”

“You don’t know me very well,” Phyllis retorted. “I’m determined to get there on my own. Texaco advertises friendly stations with clean restrooms never farther apart than forty miles or so and if I need a safe place, I’ll jolly well rely upon the Texaco Man Who Wears the Smile. I can’t see any other way.”

“I beg you not to do it. Just wait a few more months; they say it will all soon be over. You can then travel comfortably by train. Why won’t you please just wait a few months?”

“Because I’m planning to bicycle,” she replied. “If the war ended today, the trains would be even more jammed with the returning soldiers.” What choice did she really have? Hers was only an “A” sticker on the windshield of the Lincoln Zephyr and of course she had no access to public transport; she was a visiting civilian. Further, she had no contacts in the States other than Aunt Marjorie who had taken a position with a family, nannying their two adopted children.

That was the sum total of her choices.

Dawson Creek was a closed book.

“Certainly, your young niece may join you with the children!” merrily said their mother who was given to avoiding the nursery altogether. “You can all picnic at the beach.”

Phyllis had heard tales about this family and how comfortable the house was and how sadly plain the children were. Especially since the mother was a great beauty. It was quite a fright, really. Any reputable adoption agency would have taken pains to actually match the children to the parents. Surely, in the case of this family, a respectable agency would have seen fit to find children other than Little Dickie and Sally. But Marjorie had said that the family had scrimped by not going through an accredited agency and had dealt directly through a local lawyer. They had been too Scotch; they had been foolish. Cutting corners made things bleak, dreary. She was reminded again of Aberdeen.

“But come along, if you must. You’ll be taken with the weather and the place and, while the children are young, they have a certain appeal. They are obedient, and I for one will welcome the company. Here, we spend long hours at the beach.”

Then she added an abrupt reversal, “I’m returning to Aberdeen the very moment this bloody war is over. So do get here soon.”

“You are no longer concerned about Japanese submarines?”

“Certainly not. Not now!

Phyllis sighed and lit a cigarette. For the moment then Santa Barbara was as good a destination as any, so she packed only the necessities for the trip ahead, sadly lingering in the house on her last night. It was only meant to be their home during the winter—summers were to have been spent at Dawson Creek fishing and shooting in the cool air of the Peace River Valley, and now, sadly, spring was approaching. If Russell had lived, they’d be readying things for Canada. That choice had been preempted by Anissa.

Her passing moods insisted that the more she abhorred Florida, the more she was certain she would adore California, even if the children were deficient. And halfway between here and there lay Santa Fe, if one drew a reasonably straight line.

As she wandered through the house, badly needed rum in hand, she caressed the paperback mystery that still lay open on the dining room table where Russell had left it. She needed him. There had been so much that was wonderful about him.

She moved the book next to her rucksack to be packed. Her last shrine to him was now just his side of the double bed, where the crease of his head was still in the down pillow. If he were still alive, she maintained that she’d stay and never leave, but he wasn’t alive, and to be decent, she finished the work at his desk, paying an unpaid claim from the corner grocery store before she stashed the checks on top of his book near her rucksack.

Turning the bottle upside down, she sucked out the dregs of the rum, then launched on a nostalgic tour of the house once again. She had everything set out, including the paperback. She folded the death certificate and put it next to the checks. Now that everyone was made aware of her plans, she hoped to astonish the local wags with her arresting courage— setting out to bicycle her way 2,500 miles to be with her aging spinster aunt. She hoped her decision made them all feel bloody weak and uninteresting by comparison. And she had told them it was a charitable plan.

There had to be another bottle of rum on one of the shelves. Ahh. Next to a bottle with a few inches in it, she discovered several packs of Chesterfields.

The clothes she planned to take were Russell’s, left where Russell had hung them—his worn khaki shorts, a few matching shirts with pockets for coins, plus her lipstick and the zinc ointment, as well as ready cash for the first phase. She set out his pith helmet for protection from the sun. What she was not taking would be locked up and put away, but not for too long considering Florida’s mildew and how others were laying claims to everything she’d been awarded.

She poured herself the last of her new rum stash in a highball glass and dropped the bottle in the garbage. There was no ice left.

When she wasn’t being clawed over by the Palm Beach matrons, she was being hounded for money. Even the maid demanded severance just for coming once a week to wash up. She appeared after the funeral with her hand out, holding back her own key to the house as a form of ransom. Bloody woman had forced Phyllis to change the locks on the house, needing to safeguard Russell’s golf trophies and the carefully boxed collection of heirlooms. Things like a stein from Princeton and the photo albums of the three children from his first marriage to Jean, and diaries.

Later she might want to befriend his children whom she’d never met, using these heirlooms as bait. She would speak of how their marvelous father adored her; she would exonerate herself. She was not a cunning slut, she was an adventurer, and there was a difference. She had been cruelly misjudged and she would be vindicated—later, after the war.

After the war, she knew they’d all adore her.

She lit a Chesterfield and lowering herself into the chintz couch and continued talking to herself, making plans, memorizing the words of her script for a future spontaneous encounter.

“I can well imagine that you and your brother and sisters share a misconception about me.”

But she had taken the money, fair and square. She would have been a loving stepmother to them, had their dear father not died in the sudden and unfortunate accident. She wept at the poignancy as she pictured their stunned silence as they looked her over approvingly; she planned to wait a few seconds before resuming. “I’ve saved some precious items for you which I’d always planned to bring when the war was over.” It would certainly be a sad but rewarding scene.

She envisioned herself driving to them in her Lincoln Zephyr and personally presenting these gifts. Then, having been welcomed into their different homes, she’d return to Scotland and have the car shipped. Or France, she could go to France. She hoped she’d be able to manage all of this soon.

She polished off the last of the rum and lay on their double bed, weeping over the sheer heartrending picture of her being friendless and in an empty house. The clothes had been laid out, and when she shook herself awake the historic next morning she grasped his khaki shorts and tearfully climbed into them, right foot first. After placing the small things that she was to take next to the flaunted, broadcast bicycle, she bolted the doors to the house and buckled back through the house to double-check the locks.

Her eyes fixed on the shotgun in its leather case.

With a resigned sigh, she shook her rum-addled head and pulled her arms through the straps of the heavy and carefully packed rucksack. Next, she pulled her right arm through the strap on the leather shotgun holster and tried to center it before pounding the pith helmet down over her thick hair. All that remained was to throw her leg over the high bar on the second-hand Schwinn and push down, right foot first, to begin her newsworthy expedition.

She would return the gun only if Anissa apologized.

Once she left the gravel driveway, the first short section was downhill from the house with its lovely view. If she’d forgotten something, she refused to return back uphill to fetch it. She carried a wad of cash. She had a bank account. She could do whatever she fancied. And for the next 2,500 miles, she chose (chose and elected) to make a noble statement.

Anyway, Florida was not her sort of place. The people were too ghastly rich, too spoiled. She was not like that, never had been. She was still the genuine loving girl that Russell had fallen in love with, and it was time she was simply allowed to be herself—a fierce beauty who incidentally held no prejudices against people for their skin color. The only thing she found offensive in others was stupidity. She had a nose for that. Otherwise, she was as benevolent as the next person.

As she set off, she formulated her inalterable goals. One, to get from A to B; Two to get Anissa’s goat; Three, to demonstrate her stamina and devotion to Russell’s memory, who was of course watching altogether too silently but with amazement from his perch on high; and Four, to be free of the self-righteous women who were trying their best to sour everything she’d been rightfully given. (Mum among them.) Five, possibly to move eventually to Capri. She’d heard it was lovely with a blue grotto and cosmopolitan tastes.

“You won’t make it even to Tallahassee!” Richard Frenzl, the banker, said when she withdrew cash in ten dollar bills.

“You certainly don’t know me.” And each time, she reiterated this: to the bitch next door, to the postman, to the sour-puss clerk in the tackle shop, to the radio repairman and certainly to the conniving and grasping housekeeper Russell was too timid to fire, she had to repeat herself. “No one knows what mettle I am made of.” Pedal, pedal.

So she had mounted the bicycle and left the Lantana house overlooking Lake Worth, quite aware of herself as a glamorous heiress in a Technicolor movie and wishing she could see the glimmering shards of her own dazzling charisma as she passed. “You don’t know me. I do not back down.”

Every car slowed—some hooted. At first, she waved back gaily, holding the bicycle as steady as she could on the gravelly shoulder of the roadbed. They admired her, Hubba Hubba! She ought to have put a sign on the back of her shirt: California or Bust.

Within the first hour, pedaling along roads she habitually drove, she realized that her outfit was ludicrous. She looked like a Great White Hunter off in search of a lost herd of elephants. Whatever had possessed her?

And she had waited too close to noon to start out. The morning temperatures were already in the nineties. The more she struggled under the blazing sun, the less she enjoyed bicycling.

But she had stick-to-it-iveness. Russell had admired that about her: Phyllis did not waffle. Not only did she damn well do what she said she would, she was who she said she was. For the present, she had plenty of time to ruminate about her virtues. She was young, and she believed she had a charming bonny accent, and she felt that her beauty weakened men and aggravated women. She told herself that she was a star, that the world was her oyster.

But perhaps she would be wise to stay off of the major roads and head off for the green cool kudzu that covered and protected the abandoned trucks and barns of the families now torn apart by war. So many vine-tented farms had been abandoned by their men drafted away in the fight for freedom. So she turned to where the scarlet hibiscus grew, to the lantana and away from the oleander medians. She told herself to change directions.

She had started out on the South Dixie, pedaled over to Lake Worth Road then west, heading for the Florida Turnpike. Carefully folded in her shirt pocket was the map gone soggy now, and she was too bushed to swing off the bicycle and fight her slipping pack to trace out a tree-covered cooler route. She did not feel free and liberated; she was not as she had imagined herself, coasting down hills, the wind in her hair and a broad smile on her face.

Bugs hit her teeth if she parted her lips, they speckled her neck.

The late February air was heavy, a steady wind swept off the Atlantic at her back, drivers honked, convoy trucks that ground past at ‘victory speed’ forced her from her steady path to the side of the road. War Bond billboards mildewed in the humidity. Burma Shave. Swamps.

Barely two hours of searing sun and still looking even more and more like a drenched freak, she was on the verge of collapse. She could no longer fight the shifting pack and shotgun on her back, so she gave up and searched for her first overnight stop. Of course, she had planned to rely upon the soothing comforts of the advertised, clean, well-equipped Texaco stations for short breaks in her journey, and at night, to sleep in small, scrupulous Swiss-run tourist inns which must exist.

But now having turned to go along the inland route, she toiled past stinking motels thrown up for truck drivers and the railroad workforce. On her first night at a Y in the road, she bought a roadside meal for a dollar and in a rundown room shared her bed with cockroaches. All through the humid darkness, the trains clacked past whistling into the night, rocking GIs from their poker games by swaying them to sleep while Phyllis swatted flies, sweating naked under musty, line-dried sheets.

The following day was the same: under a shade tree adjacent to a stream and even doused with D.D.T., she was driven away from her midday exhaustion and earned rest by a million hungry mosquitoes. At most she had come forty miles in two days. Her tires melted on the asphalt and it was not yet summer. She went another sodden mile, trying to outrun the ravenous swarms at her back. Bugs by the millions, hatching young and hungry everywhere in the kudzu, under the sugarcane plume grass. What had made her think that a tree-lined road would be pleasant?

Forsaking her green dream of a ride through the countryside, she turned east again toward the Dixie Highway, retracing her way. At least the motels would be adequate winter fare for pale women from Detroit and their pneumonia-riddled sun-starved children. So what if people stared at her and whooped and yelled as though she was a deluded runaway.

She didn’t care anymore. She turned back and was actually surprised to stumble across her first Texaco Station on a connecting road to the coast. Delirious, she pulled into it. The promised Texaco smile floated above great moons of underarm sweat staining the proprietor’s careless uniform. His doughy face changed to a leer when he noticed that she was completely alone. Then he saw the shotgun. Not a .45. So he turned down the radio and stood closer to her.

“’Bout the most I can do is pump your tires, Miss.”

“No, thank you,” she said, out of breath, ready to faint. She tipped the bike sideways and let it fall, too tired to throw her leg over the bar, too exhausted and discouraged to return the smile.

He owed her something, something that had been promised in the slick, half-page Texaco advertisements. A cool place to rest in the shade, some pampering. Hospitality. Maybe even a Coca-Cola.

She was pointed in the direction of the clean bathroom where she was repulsed by the sight of the piss-stains under the toilet seat still up from the last hundred men who’d used it. The dried urine on the floor flaked yellow and sticky from the one-hundred-ten-percent humidity. She found an unwrapped roll of toilet paper and tore into it. One essential rationed during this war was toilet paper. Kleenex too had gone the way of great puffin. After she used some and helped herself to more, she replaced it on the sink and returned to confront the same proprietor with his eager idiotic look.

Now, he turned up the sound on his radio. He tapped his foot to the sound of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” bobbing his head, never taking his eyes off her. Raising her voice, she announced, “I think you had best clean up the bathroom.”

“Don’t expect women in here too much nowadays. Rationing’s loosening up though. We get more gas.” She gave him a weak nod, took a deep breath, and exhaled. His shirt said, CLYDE.

“It’s bloody hot!”

“You’re not from here, I can tell,” he said, congratulating himself on his close observation. She defined herself by not having a drawl as she addressed him as though he were her servant.

“I’ll be needing a place for the night, if you get my meaning.” What she meant was, clean, fit for a queen.

“Now, lady, my wife’d blow me sky high!”

She gave him a hollow laugh and in the end, he directed her to a house owned by a widow-lady who let out rooms. He reached in his shirt and scratched his belly. “If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll take you by there.” He winked. “I can show you a real good time.”

“You are quite mistaken. I’m not that sort of girl.” Drained and discouraged, she readjusted her rucksack, checked Russell’s gold Bulova watch on her wrist for the time, centered the shotgun case and hefted her weary leg over the bar to set out for the widow’s place.

“No more than three miles, and most of ‘em’s flat.”

Three miles took over an hour. She was dehydrated, fatigued and in a very dark humor. No one to blame but herself. There are canals and rivers enough in Florida, she could easily have taken a canoe and gotten halfway to hell, farther than riding this goddamned bike. Bloody fool that she was. Florida was crisscrossed with options superior to pedaling a bike.

“My word, ain’t you a sight!” Mabel Sue said, hands on hips, an apron over her cotton dress. Phyllis could barely speak.

“Clyde,” she uttered.

“Don’t I just know it? He called and said you wanted a room for the night. That’ll be two dollars, but breakfast comes with it.”

“Anything,” Phyllis said, hefting herself off and kicking down the stand. The packs on her back had shifted, pulling her to the left. The first to come off was the shotgun, which prompted a whistle from Mabel Sue.

“Mighty smart. A pistol’s easier to haul though,” she said, cocking her head to note that her foreign guest wore a sopping, stained shirt. “I got a Bendix. That’ll be fifty cents more for the electricity.” The room was clean but the pillow looked sour and the mattress lumps cast deep shadows under the chenille spread.

Phyllis was past caring.

She lay down, closed her eyes, and prayed for rescue. Russell owed her that much. Why in the hell had he let her do this? Why had he made her the innocent victim of those harpies and ex-wives who had literally driven her from her own comfortable home? What she had thought to be her own decision, was not. The bitchy neighbors had driven her out. She had been manipulated. Russell would have been distressed to see her now.

Jealousy, it all boiled down to jealousy. Even Mum. Well, it figured. More than one jungle species was known to turn against its own. There you have it—jealousy. Russell had given her the house and all the others received were poisoned apples. Well, one day, they’d all croak eating those apples. They’d kick the bucket, be tossed into a pauper’s pit.

“Jest one more thing,” Mabel Sue said, appearing in the opened doorway without knocking. “If you turn on the lights?”

Phyllis opened her eyes slowly and squinted in the direction of the voice. “Yes?”

“Well now, I couldn’t say I’d advise it because of the bugs.” Phyllis swung her head toward the open window and saw that the screens had been removed. “Moths to a flame, like they say.”

“Right,” she agreed. “I don’t think I could stay up late enough to even switch on the light.” Unending Wartime Daylight Saving—sun forever. A war with no night, no moon and stars. The blazing sun never dropped beyond the horizon any more. When it did, it popped right back.

“Any chance of finding a bit of supper here?”

“Care for a lime Jell-O salad? Some chipped beef on a bun?” Phyllis moved her head, faintly nodding. She was too bushed to quibble. “Fine. Another dollar?” Phyllis, being Scottish, was frugal but this woman was stingy-mean. She lay back pitying herself.

Mabel Sue was a case in point and reminded her just how much she disliked the native people here. Their stupid lazy accents made them seem inferior, unlettered, certainly unambitious and uninteresting. Phyllis weighed her low opinion of Mabel Sue’s dim brain against the facts, but given the present situation, she’d have to admit she’d been outsmarted. In the infernal hour it took her to pedal from Clyde’s station to this appalling house, Mabel Sue had craftily removed the screens, turned off the hot water and set some green Jell-O slime in a mold to pass off as dinner. The bar of soap was a mere sliver. The wretched towels were mildewed.

She’d been outsmarted by the Floridians, all of them. All of them women.

Miserably, Phyllis gave up and fell into an exhausted sleep, not even opening Russell’s half-finished paperback that she’d dropped in her sack. The chipped beef dinner had been spitefully placed on the night table as she slept with a bill for the dollar. Flies covered the chipped beef.