Going Native (4 page)

Tommy leans in on Wylie's ear. "Do you think he's black?" There are no visible skin parts sticking out from under the sheet.

Wylie simply shrugs his shoulders.

The air registers an eerie afterodor. . . as of ozone? It can't be healthy lingering out in this lot, absorbing the distinctly unwholesome vibes of a live unprogrammed event. He nudges Wylie's elbow. "Ready?"

Wylie doesn't respond.

"No one's getting in. Whaddya wanna do? Wait 'til the meat wagon gets here?"

Wylie turns to look him full in the face. "Sure."

Inside the store a cop holding his hat in his hand says something to the others and laughs, displaying a mouthful of astonishingly white teeth. One detective is chugging a pint of chocolate milk, another is munching from a.ripped bag of Eagle potato chips. "Catch this," mutters a voice in the crowd. "They're having a goddamn party." Someone else says, "He got what was coming to him." "Wish I'd a been here," answers another, "woulda helped blow him away." Someone asks the cop with the sideburns to lift the sheet so he can see the "perp's" face. "Move along," says the cop.

Tommy and Wylie drive over to the 7-Eleven on Melodic Boulevard, where you don't have to step over a corpse to pick up your charcoal. On the way home Wylie is silent. Tommy chatters nervously about how this convenience store calamity parallels events on TV last night except that on the show the grotesque public murders of unrelated strangers turn out to be the nefarious work of a crew of renegade aliens.

Wylie missed it, he doesn't see the connection anyway. Swinging onto Sunset, he almost clips a paperboy on a bike and blames Tommy for distracting him. As they pull into the driveway, the women whoop and wave like crazy people from their elevated deck seats, delirious as bleacher fans late in the second game of a long doubleheader. Tommy scrambles to get out of the car. "Guess what we saw?" he yells. Behind him Wylie's broad back disappears into the garage.

Oh, a quiz. The women sit up, assume exaggerated contestant poses.

"A parade," Gerri guesses.

"A bad accident," cries Rho.

Tommy is waggling his head.

"Naked people!"

"Clowns! Insane clowns!"

"A dead body," he intones.

"No," says Gerri.

"Yes."

"No," says Rho.

"Right in front of the goddamn Feed 'n' Fuel. You should have seen it. We were almost killed, weren't we Wylie?"

Wylie is rounding the corner, dragging the rusty one-wheeled grill onto the lawn. "Yeah," he agrees. "Almost."

"Wylie?" Rho, already vaguely discomfited, having minutes ago shared with Gerri the impossible lunacy of her junior year at Northwestern, the wild boy called Speedy and the ending between obstetric stirrups in a horror not even her husband knows complete details of, offering as sacrament to the sisterly cheer of the moment this raw fragment of her past, she is now queasy with pangs of betrayal at ransacking her heart for a woman she discovered halfway through the telling she isn't sure she even likes, so. . . "Wylie?"

He approaches, pauses under the deck,
gazing
up at her. "We're okay." His hand reaches to touch her bare leg. "Looked like a holdup or an attempt or something like that. Whatever happened, somebody is definitely very dead."

"Oh my God."

"Couple minutes earlier," explains Tommy, "who knows what we might have seen. Or been involved in."

"The modern world," comments Gerri. "Five blocks away."

"You shoulda seen that body lying there on the pavement just as still as anything. It looked phony it was so real."

"Yes," Gerri declares, "just what I need to see, another dead person. I am sick to death of dead persons, of hearing about them, of looking at them, of feeling sorry for them; they're on television every hour, in the papers every morning, and bleeding all over me in every magazine. Today you'd think that was all life was about, dead people."

"Long as it ain't us," drawls Tommy.

At their backs there's a flash and a sudden whoosh, a beat of gigantic wings; they swivel in their seats to the unnerving spectacle of a column of flame rearing up angrily into the dim air. "Oh, look," remarks Rho, "Wylie's got the fire going."

The daiquiri pitcher is emptied and refilled and emptied again. The citronella candles are lit. Mr. Freleng, the retired electrician next door, totters out to adjust his hose, faithful attendant to the abiding needs of the lawn god. He behaves as if he were alone, blind and deaf to the balcony audience spellbound by each fussy exertion. Upstairs the children sleep at last. Daphne gets paid and goes home. A small dark bat appears, flutters anxiously through the soft twilight, a flimsy prop on ineptly managed wires.

"Five hundred mosquitoes an hour," informs Tommy. "Amazing."

"I suppose," says Gerri, "that radar they're supposed to have causes cancer."

"Even as we speak."

"It must be exhilarating, though," she goes on, entranced by the creature's strobelike flight, "to eat what's eating you."

"Well, I don't think --"

"But imagine being that free, able to fly, to sweep across the night in some sort of erotic stupor."

Tommy extends a closed fist. "So, Mrs. Hanna, if you could come back as any animal, the varmint of your choice would be --"

"Yes, Gene, the bat, definitely the bat."

If Rho is expected to comment, she misses her cue. The diverse demands and unforeseen surges of the day, in tandem with tonight's elevated blood alcohol levels, have driven her circuitry into a sputtering staticky condition near brownout or worse, she's phasing eccentrically in and out, her attention temporarily and fiercely magnetized by the oddest fragments of isolated fact, so while Gerri natters on, from bats and sex and reincarnation to -- working hard now to amuse her audience -- stale crowd-pleasers of lust and gaucherie among her wealthy clientele, Rho is pleasantly tuned to the resonant sound of hissing meat. She watches the coals glowing in backyard obscurity like poisonous pink eggs in a metal nest, the spit and spark of yellow flame as grease hits the briquettes like a short in the night, a modest show but richly entertaining. The hours of her day pass in review at a respectful distance, she feels nothing, the simplest formulation (my life, this particular point on the graph, is it + or - ?) beyond her depleted capacities, she's tired, foundering in a profuse mystery of feckless convalescence she recognizes to her relief as more than one private neurotic dilemma, every one of her friends exhibits some degree of symptomatic distress, but what exactly is it we are convalescing from? She hasn't a clue. I need a good night's sleep. I need a good night without sleep. Overhead, the mounting darkness is studded with stars, glint of the nailheads supporting the big roof. A sudden light from the Avery bedroom projects a long yellow trapezoid over the spiky grass. Down the block the heavy metal kids are crashing and burning their way through a catchy number whose name she almost seems to recall. There's nothing around us, and deep inside, too.

The steaks are grilled to perfection, and though it's difficult to make out in the dim wicklight exactly what it is that's on one's plate or identify the grit in the potatoes, the meal is rated a four-star success. Tommy raises his glass to deliver a toast so pompous and strained it must have been intended to evoke the manner of some media android or other.

"Do your De Niro," Rho orders her husband. "You know his De Niro. All his impressions are fabulous, but the De Niro is uncanny."

He smiles wearily.

"C'mon, Wylie, put out for your guests."

The smile fades.

"Let's go now, let's get this party into high gear." Her husband's reserve is irritating her. She's fed up with the many humors and riddles of him. "I want some fun here," she demands, "and I want it now."

"You're drunk," he says.

"I'm not," announces Gerri with aggressive finality. She's the hardliner at the negotiating table. She's decided not to go in on Monday. Let her colleagues enjoy a new appreciation of her worth in a musing upon her absence. Wylie wouldn't go in if he didn't feel like it. Wylie does as he pleases. He's a free lance. He says he's in microsystems, but she knows better, she thinks he must be in government, he's a governor. She can feel her hands running up under Wylie's shirt. She can feel heat.

Tommy rises, he wants to dance. Won't anyone join in? He stumbles alone down the steep redwood steps and out across the yard, a small dark figure moving within a larger darkness. He's humming, he's dancing.

It looks to Rho as if Tommy has actually removed his shirt, and since a good hostess accommodates her company she hustles out to perform her duty. Arm in arm they dance, it's a night for grand gestures, cheek to cheek they glide on over behind the garage where in a crush of mint, she. . . he. . . well, nothing really, and he did have his shirt on the whole time.

Abandoned at the dinner table, Wylie and Gerri have somehow slipped, without apparent embarrassment, into an engaging discussion upon the nature of the soul, its defining qualities, the possibility it manifests a specific shape, the likelihood of its integrity beyond formaldehyde and flowers, speculation on its absence from an unfortunate sum of mortal beings since God, at the moment of creation, released into the universe a fixed number of souls to be recycled among a diminishing percentage of an exponentially expanding population, hence bodies with no souls. Who are these people? she inquires. He shrugs his shoulders. Movie executives? There's a dark rustle in his voice that vibrates the base of her spine. Her hands upon his chest.

When Tommy and Rho come tripping back to the campfire, Tommy presents an idea, a great escape, a week-long getaway, all four of them, to the lands over the sun. Gerri squeals and claps. On the island there will be no telephones, no televisions, no papers. No one will wear any clothes. Tommy knows a guy at Eastern who knows the choice beaches (e.g., tourist-scarce, noncommercial) in the Caribbean and who was just yesterday commending the unspoiled charms of one rare shore Tommy unfortunately cannot. . . "Saint. . ." he tries, "Saint something," looking for help to Rho, her skin in the candle glow burnished to a model's tan. He's convinced he understands the contents of her face, always has.

"They're all Saint something," says Gerri, playing to the still watcher across the table. "Those grubby Catholics always weaseling their way in first. All the best places." Ever the naughty parochial schoolgirl who also worships at other altars, in faraway places for instance, where each may feast without guilt on the fruit of the next.

Wylie is staring hard in Tommy's direction.

"When would we go?" Rho asks. In the bright bay the water is bloodwarm. It is like swimming within one another. Tommy's white ass winking on the sunny surface. Her teeth unzip his fly. She finds him, she coaxes him from his pants, no hands. "In the fall," he answers. Then in the hammock under the coconuts together, swaying. The air gravid, sweet, budding for one, for all, for him. "October, maybe. We'll do it in the fall." Pineapple perfume between her legs.

"What do you say, honey?" Skin to skin, like skydiving through the Tommyness of Tommy. Nails tight around his clenched buttocks.

Gerri's eyes, too, are on Wylie. Close against him, climbing the electric length of him to the dark hollow beneath his arm, where she licks.

Wylie doesn't know. Too early to confirm what the October schedule will allow. He drains his glass, looks off into the waning sky.

Okay, then. So Rho goes it alone. In the hotel elevator between floors shocking the tourists. Stubbled chin sanding her thighs. In scuba effervescence off the blue reef among little neon fishes.

Then, for everybody, a golden tangle of limbs and juice and heat. Tops and bottoms. Fingers and mouths.

Wylie leans forward, places his hands flat against the table, pushes himself erect. "Would you excuse me for a minute?"

"Why not," Tommy responds, watching him maneuver awkwardly over his outstretched legs.

"Don't get lost," Rho jokes. Though the edges of her lips are numb, the glass in her hand keeps finding a miraculous way to her mouth, and she's cozy, she's entered into a nice state of encapsulation, a daiquiri astronaut, communications link down, support systems nominal, destination unknown, she hasn't a care.

Wylie enters the kitchen, where he stops to regard with a sharp detective eye the scene: the nervous fluorescence, the dinner debris, the dripping faucet, the unattended television silently tuned to tonight's repeat of
Perfect Strangers,
the bloodied dish towel, the sectioned limes, the jutting drawers, the spilled olives, the greasy knives, and, taped to the door of the clattering refrigerator, a child's crayon rendering of a triangle hat atop an oblique happy face atop a red meatball body sprouting pitchfork arms and chicken legs captioned "Dabdy." He can't seem to find what he wants. He continues on down the shadowy hallway, ice cubes rattling like beans in the magic gourd of a glass he holds before him, clearing the demons from his path. His Nike'd feet fall without sound on the postmodern gray broadloom as he mounts the stairs quietly, quietly, to enter like a thief the charmed bubblegum-spiced atmosphere of his only son's room. The sleeping boy is lost within a cocoon of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle sheets from which issues the regular rasp of his asthmatic snore. From the walls threaten posters of trumpeting dinosaurs and sneering rock stars. The bookshelves hold a humble armful of books and the terrarium home to Huckleberry, the family's pet chameleon, and a Defense Department arsenal of military toys occupying every available inch of shelf space and cascading down across the floor in muddled retreat and up over the whelmed desk top, from which chaos Wylie plucks a kid's-size pair of blue and yellow plastic binoculars. He stands motionless at the window before the vanished sky, the obscure roofs and walls of his neighbors, that pathetically stunted birch beside the sandbox in his own empty yard, and, on the deck beneath his nose, his wife and her guests exactly as he left them. He raises the binoculars to his eyes, focuses the finger-smudged lenses down on Rho's face; he watches her talk, the odd movement of her enlarged lips, the pistoning of her jaw. Magnified and considered from this novel angle, her familiar features seem skewed and disproportionate, furious sketches for a modern portrait the sitter will not like. He can't hear a word through the sealed window of this climate-controlled house, only meaningless squawks of laughter, the perpetual rumbling machine of Tommy's baritone. He watches Rho, then he pans over to Gerri. He watches her. He can see her darting tongue. Pan to Tommy. Nose looming suggestively out of bland everyday mask. The binoculars pan. He watches Rho. He watches Gerri. He watches Tommy. He does not move from that spot. There is no dialogue. Only the binoculars move.