Fun With Problems (21 page)

Late in the afternoon people came out of the casinos, some half drunk and cheery, more of them looking as if they had lost money they could not afford. Sniffly women complained to the men they were with and got ignored or yelled at or sometimes smacked in the mouth. Men got smacked too, and children who were trying to be somewhere else. Drivers fought at intersections.

Panhandlers turned up and three-card-monte men whom the cops would sweep away as though with a fire hose, looking so angry at the hustlers that you had to wonder if they weren't taken behind some bleachers and beaten senseless to discourage the others. Or to impress the casino owners that there was scant tolerance for competition. Around twilight, several very young hookers came out, dressed to show more skin than the damp wind made comfortable and to match the neon. Their pimps, Duffy thought, would be just out of
sight, laughing in the darkness of the side streets, smoking dope, getting in and out of unlighted cars that took some of the girls away and brought others to replace them.

Actually, the evening was lovely, gathered up as it was in sea and sky. Its transcendent light resisted all the defacements organized Pahoochee could inflict on it. Duffy kept drawing as late as he could. When the beach lights and tiki torches and fluorescents came on, he colored them into the rest.

Back alone with his air conditioner in the unquiet night, Duffy put the sketchbook to the maximum brightness of his lamp and looked over what he had. A chaos, he thought, like old times. Long before, Duffy thought he had given people a few lessons in entropy, how it looked, how you got it down. He felt he badly needed a drink, but securing one was too much work. He went to sleep instead.

The next day he packed his bags and sat beside the motel's laundry lines while the children assembled to await their school bus. To pass the morning he mapped out a sketch with crayon to use for a study if he should want to repeat the work in oil. In daylight, he was well pleased. It seemed to him the piece had turned out properly strong and could be made stronger with the right colors. Over his teaching years, Duffy had developed a regrettable academic eye that led him too readily to comparisons. It was bad for his morale to see other people's earlier sensibilities in the things he did. But in ironic ways his beach scene reminded him of turn-of-the-twentieth-century studies of Coney Island. If all of Stella's good early stuff, all those wild whirling colored lights, was about the teeming overripe possibilities of the coming age, maybe his, Duffy's, was about the exhaustion of those possibilities, the disappearance of that time, the great abridgment of the popular age. The ghost of a century, a show closing down for lack of interest. But, he thought, somebody had to be around to tell that story. It was too easy to mock the tag end of it, to do a burlesque on the failure of public joy. Someone ought to show it with a degree of compassion, he thought. Someone ought to have a heart about it.

Ready, he called a taxi on the hall phone to take him to the airport, to start the long day of jammed flights and wall-to-wall junk-food stands. Pahoochee was a composition of grays at that hour, clay-colored sand, dun skies, tin ocean. An old black man drove the cab, listening to a radio on which a white preacher peddled prayer cloths.

As they passed the parking lot of the hotel from which Duffy had been ejected, he saw a young dark-haired girl with flushed fair skin getting out of a beat-up Corolla. She was wearing a Pahoochee State sweatshirt. Duffy saw that it was young Staci, the waitress who had so innocently and disastrously attempted to bring him bogus crab. He asked the driver to pull over beside the lot and rolled his window down.

"Staci?"

She turned to him, shading her eyes. Duffy told the driver to wait and got out of the cab. On an impulse, he tore the crayon study he had made of the beach from his sketchbook.

Staci, facing the declining sun, looked at him without a flicker of recognition.

"Hi," she said, and smiled.

He wrapped his drawing between two sheets paper and slipped it into a large cardboard envelope.

"I have a drawing I'd like to give you. It's of the beach."

"Oh," she said. "How come?"

"What do you mean," he asked her, "'how come'?"

"Well, like, why?"

"Okay," Duffy said. He sighed at the burden he had inflicted on himself. For all he knew, it might all end with his getting arrested again. "My name is James Duffy. I'm an artist." He had been about to add that she might easily sell it, but he simply handed it over.

"Wow," she said.

"Yes," he told her. "And I was due to lecture at your school on Tuesday. At your university. But unfortunately I was detained."

"Yeah?"

"So, because you're a student at Pahoochee—you are a student, I think?"

"Yes, sir."

"Because you missed out on the lecture, you see..."

She shook her head energetically, interrupting him.

"No! I wasn't gonna go. Even if I heard about it. Which like I didn't anyway. And on top of which I had to work."

Looking past her, he saw that there was a cartoon of a crab pasted over a window on the restaurant side of the hotel. He frowned, and seeing him do so, she frowned as well. But thankfully, from his point of view, she did not turn to follow his gaze.

"Because you missed out on the lecture, Staci, I'd like you to take this."

Staci took it and shook her head fetchingly in some confusion. As it had occurred to Duffy that Staci might profit by selling his drawing, another random inspiration struck him: he might ask her to pose for him in the nude someday. That, he understood, would never do. If he presented such a notion, she might even suffer a ghastly attack of recovered memory.

"Wow," she said. "Okay."

"See, I'm on my way out of town," Duffy told her. He turned and looked over his shoulder, sort of miming "out of town."

"Great!" she said.

He smiled and extended his hand. She switched her awkward grip on the envelope and shook his right hand quite heartily.

"So
adios,
Staci."

"Right," she said. "So ... did you have a great time in Pahoochee ... um, James?"

"Thank you, dear," Duffy said. "Yes, I did."

And, leaving, he felt much better than when he had arrived.