Then she became crazed with fear and self-revulsion and shot down through the marsh to her cabin.
Where she sat out the waves of fear then confusion then curiosity then disappointment. Here was the stray lost tourist of her imaginations, and here was she, unfriendly and not at all gracious. Eventually she walked back up. He was dressing under the glittering aspen that overhung the pool. He put on his backpack and was gone.
THE SMELL OF motor oil. The sound of an engine idling down in the street. Marly heard it shut off. She got off Joe’s bed and moved to the chair in the corner. Closed her eyes. For a long time, no sound. Then someone creaking up the stairs. A silhouette of shoulders at the door. A tired man flopping onto the bed. All was dark. All quiet. But the sound of sleep breathing.
“Joe?”
But Joe was already asleep, and Marly let him, while she, sunk into the chair, let her eyes close, let magazine visions pour from her mind, her Grand in elegant architectural renderings, its exterior stone polished white, new soffits enclosing all copper plumbing and furnace ductwork and silver circuitry, the high tin ceiling reshaped by expert tinsmith hands, the inlaid teak bartop gleaming with polish, the lobby’s cut glass chandelier softly illuminating davenports of umber velvet, halogen sconces casting shadows on royal green carpets, an ebony handrail crowning a balustrade of wrought iron swans and flowers, the stairway spiraling around a column of bronze, gold-capped rods retaining the carpeting as it flowed up the oak treads to a skylight rotunda, where quiet guests read international newspapers, and the chatter of foreign tongues rose over the soft parade of movie stars and entrepreneurs, walking to their dormered rooms with canopied beds and thick cream-colored comforters, floor to ceiling windows, mahogany bureaus and Morrison tables, bathrooms of dark blue porcelain and double glass showers.
“Joe?”
A sudden urge, to lie alongside him, to run her fingers in his hair, moved her to the edge of his bed. Asleep, Joe turned over, his warm mouth landing against the flesh of her inside arm. Cool moisture where his lips touched her skin. He shifted so his head came to settle in the cusp of her lap. She smoothed his cheek. Wondered what he’d do if he woke up. Wondered what she’d do.
Later, he turned, rolled, His back to her, Well, she thought, why not, and kissed his neck. She smelled her breath mix with his skin, heated. Her lips whispered.
“Joe?”
Dead asleep, but, wasn’t he aware in some way, listening for her, waiting for her hands to grasp him as they once had, eager for her warm fingers to slip inside his shirt, his pants, secret their velvet oil, entwine him with her arms and slick flanks. His hips shifted, wasn’t he maybe reciprocating the flourish she herself felt inside, the wondering, the desire to know, what it would feel like—after all these years—to weld body to body, glossy flesh against flesh? Would it be once again like it once was then, rippling her every fiber, touching the liquid nest between her hips the way he had once done? She took his hand. She placed it to her face.
He shot up with a start.
“Wade, what the. . .?”
She pulled her hand away. He looked at her. Not sure who she was. Or who he was.
“Marly? Where’s Wade?”
“In the lobby, waiting for you.”
Joe rubbing his face, she swept back her damp hair. Asking herself, Jesus, what are you doing?
“I, uh. . .what’s. . .are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
She patted his hand. Straightened her blouse. Rose and went to the door.
“You know, Joe, when things ever do repeat themselves. . .maybe they’re even better the second time?”
Fumbling for the door, she left and went to her own bed, where she slept alone.
WADE PUSHED OPEN the door to Anne’s room. Her dark female shape lay asleep on the bed. A long time he stood over her. Sunstorms flared in his eyes. His body clattered sweat.
“Wade?” Anne lifted her head groggily. “What’re you doin here?”
“Someone was in with Joe.”
“What time is it?”
“You want me to go?”
“Wait a minute.” She sleepily sat up. “You caught me naked.”
“I know.” She was remarkably naked; he could sense that even as the pounding screen of his vision washed green then red. He sat beside her. “I’ll take my clothes off, if you want.”
She pulled on a t-shirt and propped a pillow against the wall. She stretched. Yawned. Shook her head.
“Wade? You ain’t quite all there sometimes, are you?”
He shook his head, placing his hands against the rim of his eye. He could see only a large oval nothing surrounded by a lace of jagged lights, or turquoise pain flooding his eyes, beautiful to watch, actually, or a speckled frenzy of microscopic globules. Distant conversations, everything Chinese, mute gongs and flutes.
His rested his head in the pocket of her shoulder, her chest soft, her arm feathery. He felt her heart beating. Stroking his choppy hair; blue lightning flickered from her fingers. His body became long, dizzyingly long; his legs dangled off the end of the bed out the window across the street. Nothing was touching him now, not even his own hands holding back his face. His eyes glazed. Sleep, he thought, floating; ethereal and white. Delirium receded into the dark room with no center. Breathing the inside of her arm, a black veil swept the storm from his eyes.
When he woke again, Anne was at the window, arms folded around herself. He turned on the lamp. The parchment shade threw a smoldering brown on the walls and a hot white oblong on the ceiling. Almost how it looked right before a headache. In the dark light Anne’s skin blended into the faded paint of old walls, leaving the outline of her body glowing.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Join the club.”
In the drawer of the rickety cabinet where the lamp sat, one crinkled color photograph. He viewed it askance, not all of his vision back to normal yet. It was a girl and a boy, he couldn’t tell who, the light so brown, his eyes so frayed, the colors so faded and washed out.
“Who’s this? You and your boyfriend?”
“Me and my boyfriend? Are you blind?”
Wade squinted harder. The boy and girl familiar looking, but holding one another so closely, hard to even clearly tell them apart. Just behind them, a small single prop engine plane, its door flung open, its propeller invisibly whirling, obvious from how its gusts furled the girl’s long hair into ribbons, some of them flying across the boy’s mouth, which was wide open ringing with laughter. What was clear was how excited they were; whatever it was about, you could tell that much at once.
“You look so happy.”
“I do, huh? Take a closer look, why don’t you? I wasn’t even born when that picture was took.”
Wade squinted. Looking more closely, he realized—because she looked so happy—he’d assumed Anne was the young woman, but it should have been obvious from the red hair who it was.
“I know. It’s your mom.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“And so. . .that’s your dad with her?”
“Oh God no.” Anne laughed. “I don’t know who it is. Not that I ain’t asked, all the time, but all she’ll ever say is, it’s just some boy, she forgot who, no one important.”
“He looks important to me.”
And familiar looking. Wade closed his eyes, feeling sure that any minute he was going to know who it was. He looked once more, and now, sure enough, he did know.
He looked at Anne with a cocky grin. “You sure you don’t know who?”
“What’s your problem?” she said, annoyed.
“Try looking again.” He put the picture next to his own face. “Don’t you think he kind of looks like me?”
Anne sat up, took the picture, looked carefully.
“Holy shit! I don’t believe it.”
“Told you so. It’s Joe.”
She ignored him. She stared a long time.
“Holy shit!”
IT RAINED. FOR da
ys the heavens deluged Meagher, delaying Emma Meeks’s burial. On the fourth morning, a streak of blue appeared in the sky but by the time they gathered in Sheriff McComb’s office, the black firmament reopened and torrents descended with redoubled fury.
Wade was cold; it had been a long wait. Burchard and Gustafsen, huddled in rumpled suits, slept upright on the bench along the wall. Vapors clouded their faces as they snored asynchronously with each other. Joe sat on an old chair near the door, nervously bouncing his knees, worrying the frays of the cushions.
Duffy, the sheriff’s deputy, came in from the dingy hall carrying in a tray of coffee and cups.
“Frances’ll never make it, now with that road the way it gets. She’s probly stuck already.”
“She’ll make it,” Joe Meeks said, “even if her jeep don’t.”
“You put it off three days now already, why not another, at least until this weather lifts? She’s out of her flippin mind to drive down in this.”
“Who’s out of her flippin mind?” Evan Gallantine ducked in the door, rain gear crackling as he shook off the water trickling down his face. He turned to Joe, apprising the situation. “You’re actually going through with it then?”
Joe nodded.
“And you know I can’t be here, right?”
“Why would you be? She’s only family.”
“I’d take umbrage at that. . .if it weren’t raining so hard.”
Joe didn’t find it funny. “Glad one of us is in such high spirits, ‘bout our ‘generous stroke of luck’.”
“I’m sorry, Joe, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s more that I’ve been in high gear than high spirits. At least the coffin made it.”
Outside, a frilly white brocade casket stuck out the back of Duffy’s pickup, covered with a plastic tarp that was collecting large pools of rainwater. Evan had arranged for it to be sent from Billings, where he’d been day and night with lawyers, since no coffins were to be had in Meagher.
“Frances is sure goin to have something to say, she lays eyes on that over-stuffed Styrofoam go-cart.”
“It was all they had on such short notice. I was lucky to get that one.”
“That’s a coffin?” Wade had expected wood and little gold handles, like his mother had, not something all covered with white crinkly fabric. “I thought it was a sofa.”
Joe blurted out a laugh. Evan shrugged. “Frances shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, my humble opinion.”
Wade wondered what a gift would be doing in a horse’s mouth, but stayed silent, seeing Joe, jumpy, agitated, biting his lip and pulling off flecks of chapped skin.
“Joe, by the day after tomorrow, this will all be behind us. All that’s left is to put your pen to paper. You need something to really worry about? How about that it’s already getting late for getting Wade into a good boarding school.”
Oh great, Wade thought. To himself.
“So, it might help to know I had my office assistant in L.A. look into it. If anyone knows how to pull strings, she does. We’ll get him in.” He lifted his watch. “I should leave.”
Joe peered out the rain sheeted window. Just as Evan drove off, an old silver jeep parked out front.
“She’s here,” he announced, standing, zippering his jacket.
Frances hobbled in, rainwater cascading from her hat brim, thwacking more from her overcoat. She stomped her boots so that deltas of mud streamed at her feet, rousing Burchard and Gustafsen, who struggled gallantly to their feet, stoop-shouldered and baggy-suited. Their chivalry went unacknowledged, as Frances gave the sheriff’s office the once over.
“This place don’t look any better’n when I sat here years ago.”
Duffy neatened his desk, wanting to ignore her, but galled nonetheless. The old coot never failed to remind him that she—a woman—had his job long before him, during the war, and here he was, nearly forty, a grown man, and still only a deputy himself. It was only due to the shortage of men, he assured himself, but privately he believed it was because Frances wasn’t a natural woman in the first place.
Evan stood at the door. “Frances, I’m sorry to say I can’t be here, but if we could just put this off another day until the weather clears? We could move you into the Grand for a. . .”
“Even better,” Frances cut in, “whyn’t we just wait’ll I die myself, then you can bury her’n me all in one shot?”
A shadow of silent contempt crossed Evan’s face, but without further comment, he smoothed his hair—its wetness revealing its actual thinness—and left.
Frances peered out the rainy window. “What’s that gaudy canoe you got in your pickup, Duffy?”
“That ain’t a boat, Frances,” Duffy said, with poorly concealed smugness, “it’s Emma.”
Frances poised herself over her cane, staring at the coffin.
“Why, we goin to put her in the Hellwater and float her down to the Gulf of Mexico?” She turned to Wade. “Promise me you won’t ever let no one stuff me in a thing like that.”
Wade shook his head; she nodded. Duffy offered her coffee, and the room relaxed when she accepted it. She sat, whereupon Burchard and Gustafsen took the opportunity to quit being gentlemen and sit themselves. In no time they were back to sleep. Frances nodded off herself, then woke with a start.
“You so-called men might get a move on any time now.”
“Plaggemeyer should be over any time now,” Duffy said.
“Plaggemeyer, what do we need that wastrel for?”
“Well, as justice of the peace, a course.”
“Ah damn.” Frances switched her cane from hand to hand. “I hate this waitin. Got no cream for this coffee?”
Duffy shook his head. “Guess you have to make do without.”
“Don’t see how it matters what I make anymore.” She poled herself to her feet. “I’ll make water, least I can still do that. It’s back this way, if I recall.”
On her way to the back, she stopped to poke open the jail room door; Wade, ever curious, followed to have a look. In the holding cell was one prisoner, the shoeless unshaven young man Wade had seen in Edna Maloney’s clinic.
Frances noticed Wade. “Well, this don’t look like a half bad place; maybe I’ll come here once they boot me off my land. What crime you think I could do to get me a fancy cellroom like this?”
Wade laughed. Though no one else seemed to, he found her very comical.
Frances gestured at the prisoner with her cane. “Who’s this monkey they got in here?”
The prisoner grabbed the bars. “This ain’t a zoo!”
Duffy leapt to his feet to get between them.
“What’d he do? Kill somebody with his smell?”
“Nobody quite knows.” Duffy squeezing past Frances to close the door. “McComb says he’s a possible felon, so we’re checkin him out. He no doubt done somethin.”
Frances ignored him. “You in there; what’d you do?”
“I did nothin!” the possible felon shrieked.
“Then you got what you deserved.”
Frances left to do her business. The commotion from the cellroom woke a befuddled Gustafsen.
“The only one comfortable at these damn burials is the stiff,” he grumbled when he remembered where he was. “Next one I’m comin to won’t be till my own.” He smirked at his dozing companion, Burchard. “He looks like hell, don’t he, young man?” he said to Wade. “Damn no-good. Pissed his life away and looks it too, don’t he? His suit ain’t even pressed. And you see how he’s aged?”
Satisfied with his observations, Gustafsen settled down to sleep again. Almost immediately his twisting and churning roused Burchard, who also took a while to get his bearings. When he did, he tapped his companion. “Gus,” he said, though Gustafsen was fast asleep, “remember years ago we all of us took that graduation trip? You recall? We went to some big city or other. I remember realizing how us Meagher people sure are a world apart, ain’t we?” He nodded vigorously, impressed with his wisdom, then resumed tapping
Gustafsen again. “Even so, I’ll tell you somethin else. When it comes to them Meeks’s, they’re in a whole ‘nother world altogether.”
As Frances returned, the phone rang. Duffy answered, listened, hung up.
“Plaggemeyer says he ain’t goin to preside over any burial in this kind of rainstorm.”
Frances sat down, winded. “The hell with him.”
Duffy poured her more coffee. “An he wondered if you heard the news about Harlo?”
Joe started. “Harlo? What about him? He’s getting out of prison?”
“Already is out. They released him yesterday.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“So will he, I have anything to do with it,” Frances said. “Hell with all this. Joe, you go get on with it, without Plaggemeyer and without Harlo. And me as well. I ‘bout had my fill of this all.”
She sat down and was soon herself asleep.
Duffy buttoned his coat. “Joe, that casket weighs more’n a lead submarine. Us two ain’t enough to lift it down.”
“There’s Wade.”
“Still ain’t enough. Doin it another day is out of the question?”
“You don’t have to come, Duffy. Suit yourself.”
Joe went out, soaked before the door closed behind him. From the back, another rounds of yelps from the possible felon gave Wade an idea.
“What if we take along that guy? The guy in jail?”
Duffy looked out as Joe disappeared into the bleak pouring rain. “Well, now you mention it, ain’t any law says the scrawny s.o.b. can’t do a little community service, that I know of.”
As Duffy was letting him out, the prisoner, sensing his new status, refused to leave unless Duffy removed his handcuffs. “I’ll go barefoot, though, that way you know I won’t leave. How far could I get without shoes?”