Fun With Problems (20 page)

"Were you off somewhere?" he asked the cook, looking with contempt at the man's attire. "Was your riverboat about to catch the evening tide? Keeping steam up, right? Then, when the health department shows up, you disappear into
the bayous. Mammal on the menu, folks!" Duffy shouted at the top of his voice. "Chef Boyardee here is a-gonna skin us some muskrats. When he runs out of fish-flavored toothpaste and red dye."

"You damned drunk," the enraged man screamed. "What the hell are you calling me?"

Duffy's rage increased.

"I'm a-saying you a warlocky witch, motherfucker. Bad man wizard. I'm a-saying you bad food poison man. I'm a-saying they gonna send you back to the swamp to be drowned in shit."

Duffy managed to sidestep the fat man's expertly executed kick, intended to painfully disable him. Two waiters caught their boss and only with great difficulty held him back. The small waitress looked on in tears.

"You no-good bastard," the cook cried, indicating Staci. "You bastard, you made her cry!" Altogether beside himself, he paused for breath.

Duffy drew himself up to his full height, which was about five foot nine.

"That's because her time to weep has come," he said viciously. He pointed his finger in the cook's face. "Yes, M'sieu Escoffier." Duffy turned to look over his shoulder, feeling, incorrectly, that a wave of support was gathering behind him. "The time has come when we must all weep. Because, goddamn you, you filthy poisoned rat, whatever you've done in there to that poor young girl—a child half your age, you scum—there shall be no more of it, I promise you." Blind to the chaos around him, Duffy carried on upbraiding the chef as a security man, aided by volunteers from among the male customers, wrestled him toward the door. At this point, in custody, he broke down and wept himself. "Christ's blood! Crab? Don't make me laugh. The only crabs you people got is in your pubic hair!"

It was all he remembered of the evening. Next day, the Rind boys found their way back to the Petrel's Perch in hopes of seeing more of Duffy.

Of course he had missed the lecture. At Pahoochee State College—or University, as it had been lately designated—colleagues rallied round Hank Rind to console and embrace him. Secretly, though, ill-wishers chortled and claimed never to have had any regard for him or for Duffy or his work.

Enormity descended. He was awakened by a policeman—in his experience always a bad sign. An African proverb he had learned in the Peace Corps went something like, "The morning policeman shoots the mice to frighten the monkeys." The maddened policeman, morning's minion. Despite the early hour, a man who said he was the manager of the hotel appeared, another who claimed to be an assistant district attorney, and several of the hotel's security stooges. One of the stooges was charging Duffy with assault, the felony compounded by his brandishing of a ballpoint pen. Brought before the town justice, Duffy had no choice but to call his estranged wife for bail.

When his turn at the phone came, he called collect, in violation of the instructions on the sign over the phone. To his relief it was Otis herself who answered. Otis who must know that it was him she really loved. Otis, descendant of an insane signer of the Declaration of Independence. But when he recounted his story, she was bad Otis.

"I'm so sorry," Otis said weepily. A false voice, Duffy
knew. "My purse was stolen in the supermarket. I've canceled all my credit cards. Each and every one."

"You gotta be shitting me," Duffy suggested.

"Alas not."

"Well, how about a check?"

"My checkbook is with it, Jim. I've stopped all payments."

Duffy swore so foully that even his fellow inmates at the county jail were dismayed.

"Honestly," said Otis, "I am sorry, darl. But I'm not sure I can cover what you need. Frankly, you've been in the drunk tank before. All things pass, big guy."

"This is no drunk tank," Duffy pleaded. It was, finally, a lie. "Do you know where I am?"

"Yes, I think so. How funny! Because I was just reading about the state prison there. The book is called
Worse Than Slavery.
"

Duffy paused to gain control of himself.

"Otis, sweetheart, I need your help badly."

"I know, my dear. My help isn't what it was."

"Please, baby." Duffy's fellow inmates, a generally semiviolent lot of drunks and panhandlers, laughed openly. It was impossible to converse discreetly. "What about your boy toy there? He's got bread."

"Bread? Aren't you quaint. Do you mean Prosser? Yes, he has 'bread,' I suppose. His latest novel is pretty successful for a literary book."

"Isn't that nice?" Duffy said. "So get three grand off him. I'm good for it."

"I'm surprised at your lack of—what shall I call it?— pride?"

"You tell that illiterate pinhead he better cough it up. Otherwise his ladylove's rightful spouse will—in the fullness of time—go up there and make him eat a hardcover copy of his successful literary book."

"He's not afraid of you, Jim."

"Really? Then he's made real progress in fear management. How's his ex, by the by? Still cochair of Lesbian Gardening?"

Otis tittered wickedly. Once, to hear Otis titter was to possess her.

"You may not be ashamed to ask for Prosser's help, Jim. To tell you the truth, I'm ashamed to ask on your behalf."

"Oh, bullshit, Otis. Stop fucking around! Is he there?"

"I'll ask him to call you, dear," she said delicately.

Duffy stopped to consider his options. It would not do to have her hang up. All at once it occurred to him that Otis, in her abysmal deviousness, was helping him out after a fashion. Only by knowing her as well as he did could he realize that she was distantly suggesting a strategy: that he lean on the husband himself, man to man, as it were. As to whether she had really lost her bag? Unknowable.

When the call came, it was Prosser phoning from his office. As if, Duffy thought, he felt he would be safer there.

"Hey, Prosser! Oho, man!"

The response was a charged silence.

"Hey, how's everything, Pross? How's the wife?"

Prosser did not ask which.

"Ah," he replied without much inflection. "How are you, Jim?"

"Prosser?"

More anxious silence. Good, thought Duffy.

"Prosser, I'm where the prisoners rest together. They hear not the voice of their oppressor."

"Really?" the novelist asked uneasily. "Where's that?"

"It is hell," Duffy said. "Your old friend is in hell." He was moved to pity at his own condition. "Honest, can you help me?"

"I don't know, Jim. How?"

"Listen, can I tell you something? May I presume? I know our relationship is awkward."

A sniff of distaste. "Yeah, sure."

"The thing is, Pross, I thought I had found Jesus Christ. He was my personal savior. Honestly! I know you'll scoff."

Prosser did not scoff. He seemed to be listening quietly.

"But the individual I mistook for Jesus Christ was not. He wasn't Jesus at all. Can you guess who he was? Can you, Prosser?"

"No," said Spearman. After a moment he asked, "Who?"

Duffy looked over his shoulder to see whether the duty deputy might be eavesdropping on his plaints. But the man was occupied with the color ads for phone sex in his copy of
Penthouse.

"He was Satan!" Duffy cleared his throat for resonance. "Yes. The Prince of Darkness himself. Horrible," Duffy moaned spookily. "Satan," he whispered thickly. He tried not to overdo it. But Prosser had a craven's imagination.

"Jim, you ought to seek ... You know."

"Seek! Seek! Their name is legion, Spearman. They are many!"

"You probably need help," Prosser said.

"Oh, shit, man," Duffy said. "I do."

"Medication." Prosser suggested.

"Poisoners!" Duffy told him in a breathy stage whisper. "Listen, Prosser, I'm beside myself with terror. Satanic voices are telling me I require closure."

"Closure?"

Duffy did what he could to make the word sound truly terminal.

"A dreadful closure, Prosser. They say if I can leave here today I can get into treatment." He looked around to make sure no one was watching too closely. "But if I can't, Satan says I must seek closure where the most wrong was done. He says I must"—Duffy inhaled to aspirate his words most portentously—"return to my long home. For closure."

"Why?" Prosser croaked.

"They won't tell me until I get there. I hear insect laughter. I'm so afraid."

"If you tell me where you are," Prosser said, "maybe I can call someone."

Oh, tricky, thought Duffy, but he would have to know.

"Here's the deal," Duffy said, trying to fend off madness while pretending it. "They'll let me out if I agree to go into therapy."

"Therapy where?" Spearman asked in a small voice. He was afraid, Duffy knew, that it might take place at the same establishment in western New England where he had been purged of drink before. It was not far from the house Prosser shared with Otis. Whether Prosser liked it or not, it was where he was likely to end up.

"I think it's Alaska," Duffy told him. "They'll release me in care of my mother."

"Your mother?"

"Her estate," Duffy hastened to add. "It's absurdly complicated. I'll need some money to get there too, Prosser. Congratulations on your new book, by the way."

A short time later Duffy heard the police dispatcher taking down the numbers and expiration date of Prosser's credit card.

"Bacon tells us," he said to the deputy as he packed his soiled belongings to leave, "the coward is loyal only to fear."

"I need you to shut up," the young deputy said.

The locals were vindictive, especially the hotel people. For three days Duffy was forbidden to leave town, and he was threatened with deformed bounty hunters if he did so. The first day he was homeless, which, in Pahoochee, was itself illegal. His overnight bag contained a single change of clothes, and the venal bubbas who ruled the town owned all the hotels, all the soap and all the potable water. Earning a little more of Otis's mocking solicitude, he was finally able to buy two nights in advance at a washboard-sided welfare motel on a fetid canal a few blocks from the Gulf. The university, for its own reasons he presumed, fixed things with the city. The motel chain hand-delivered some letters to him and to his lawyer in Boston threatening action for damages, though nothing came of it in the end. They also produced a form requiring his signature on which he agreed never again to seek hospitality at their establishments.

While the paperwork and money changed hands, the law required Duffy to remain in Pahoochee to await the disposition of his case. Duffy spent his first hours in the Spray Motel avoiding the public spaces where crack was sold. His solitary window opened on an alley—that is, it failed to open on the alley. An ancient air conditioner aspirated its prolonged death rattle. Mounted on the spastic springs of his sofa bed, he passed the time doodling on available surfaces and trying to sort hopes and dreams from hallucinations.

By nightfall the darkness gave forth only cries of laughter, pain and distant small-arms fire, along with the emphysemic cooler's soldiering on. Duffy told himself that the machine was deciding his fate, that he could keep going not a moment longer than the air conditioning, that its vital signs were measuring his. Like the unhappy man in the Good Book, he had prayed that eve be sudden. At night he preferred that morn be soon.

After first light he looked down the alley and saw the Spray Motel's contingent of moms and welfare children lined up for the school bus. They were all black except for one bedraggled and overweight pale mom with a speed rack of front teeth, who chattered continually to the other mothers regardless of whether they answered her or not. The Spray was no place for any kid to have to live, Duffy thought. But the kids were clean, carrying books, even if their mothers and grandmothers were dressed for a day on their knees with a brush. Or for a previous night of heavy dates. The high spirits of the children lifted his heart briefly, but he soon found the preschool assembly as dispiriting as everything else. It was not right, he thought; another presentation of how things so often were not. And as so often then, things made him want to have a drink. Also not to have one. The drinking life, he thought, was lived moment by moment. He was getting too old for it, and presently he would be too old to change.

He took what was left of Otis and Prosser's money and bought some art supplies at the college end of the beach. He also bought a new cell phone and a cheap wristwatch. Cell phones and wristwatches were items that cops looked for on the persons of sad old men in crummy beach towns. They were signs of some right to sociopolitical existence, of access to human rights. On the other hand, if someone's gad-getry had gone missing in the mall, for example, elderly loser types like Duffy were one of the favored profiles the cops hassled. To crown his respectability, Duffy treated himself to a haircut and beard trim, which rendered him more or less identical to the male section of his demographic.

With his colors and a good-quality sketchbook Duffy picked out a bench supported on its right flank by a Confederate cannoneer and facing the widest flat space between the paved walkway and the rippling Gulf. There he waited for Pahoochee's Sunday to unfold.

The first spectacle that assembled itself was a volleyball game, played by teams of kids from the university. They were a pretty pack, mostly fair, the girls and some of the boys blonded up beyond nature's providing. There were also dark-haired Hispanic youths and a few Asians and African Americans, lending variety to the flesh tones. In the same cause, there were plenty of tattoos, bright new ones with particularly nice greens. Down in the water, a couple of optimists were trying to invoke sympathetic magic with their surfboards. A few managed to draw enough swell out of the insipid shore to get up and stand and surf the film of oily water over the near sand.

There was lots to look at if you were not in a hurry, if it did not bother you that you had seen it before, if you were observer enough—well, he thought, let's say artist enough!—to look it all over one more time. In the early afternoon a passel of extremely self-conscious punks sauntered along the beach sidewalk, looking about as scared and scornful as adolescents could. They were depressing and also frightening in ways they might not have imagined. Duffy expanded his scene to bring in a grove of suffering palm trees, a memorial plinth, an abandoned sandwich sign advertising a psychic. He kept adding: part of a ruined merry-go-round, faded and stripped, between the public beach and his estranged hotel. A bag lady with a Winn-Dixie cart sat on the edge of it; some of the punks draped themselves across the rusty poles and peeling painted horses. He drew it all in, regardless of scale.