Second Skin (20 page)

“He waited, you see? Waited until he was done to tell me. So now for ten bucks the blood’s on my hands too, and all over I’m dying, I can feel it. That guy there, that Harry,” pointing down, drawing the robe tight between her knees, “he came in too soon, you see, and tried to save his buddy, so they killed him. … I wish it was me.”

I let go of her hand, I helped to turn up the bathrobe collar, I wrapped the white mountain-goat rug around her lap. Her head was down. I touched the thin blonde hair on the back of that small ageless skull and spoke to the chief, made it clear to him that I didn’t want to see the sailor’s face.

And then the chief gave orders: “Get the basket stretcher out of the truck. You two, wrap him in the sheet. But leave the little one alone, he’s not ours…

Was Tremlow’s first name Harry? Was it Tremlow lying now at the bare feet of the streetwalker sitting in the shiny partially chopped-up straw chair? Tremlow killed at last while defending my little lost son-in-law? Or was it Tremlow who had swung the sacrificial hatchet, destroyed the hideaway, lopped
off the fingers? This, I thought, was more like Tremlow, but I could not be sure and was careful that I would never know.

I looked again and saw the little white calfskin book lying near the left hand of Fernandez. It was a book from the past, a soft white unread book just out of reach where I left it.

“Don’t worry,” I called softly to the bowed figure on the straw chair, “there’s no blood on your hands.”

And web belt, meaty automatic and gaiters, these I dropped into the back of the pickup truck with Harry’s body, stared at the sheeted form bound into the mesh of the basket, and stepped away, flagged down a taxi, returned as quickly as I could to the predawn silhouette of my own cheap hotel.

She was sitting in the straight-backed chair, poor Sissy, and wide awake, clear providential eyes fixed on the elevator. I held the door so it wouldn’t bang and took off my cap and smiled. Then wrinkled and bloodstained and more haggard than Sissy herself, I approached her slowly and helped her out of the chair and took her into my arms and kissed her. Her mouth tasted like old wax paper but it was the kiss of my life.

And we were wrong about him, Cassandra, weren’t we? Just a little wrong, Cassandra?

“Papa,” I cried, “no, Papa. Please….”

“I shall do it, Edward, I tell you. See if I don’t….”

“But please, please, what about Mamma, Papa? What about me?”

“Some things, Edward, can’t be helped….”

And crouching at the keyhole of the lavatory door, soft little hands cupped on soft fat knees and hot, desperate, hopeful, suddenly inspired: “Wait, Papa, wait, I will play for you, poor Papa.”

“No, no, Edward, never mind…it will do no good…”

But I raised one of my hands then, clapped it over my lips, waited. And when I failed to answer him there was only silence behind the lavatory door. Was he caught off guard? Uncertain? Or stricken even more deeply with despair, sitting on the old brown wooden toilet seat with vacant eyes and pure white bone
less mortician’s hands clasped vacantly between his knees? I knew by the peculiar intensity of that prolonged silence that I was safe for awhile, that he could do nothing at least until I had played him my Brahms. It was the dripping faucet that gave the silence its peculiar tight suspended ring, the dripping faucet that convinced me: it would hold his attention until I could play my Brahms.

“Are you there, Edward?”

But as small and fat and ungainly as I was, and as much as I wanted to talk with him, plead with him, I had just been inspired and knew enough, suddenly, not to answer. One sound, I understood, and he might well blow his head off then and there.

“Edward?”

But his voice was weaker while the monstrous dripping was louder, more dominant, more demanding. And my cheeks were fatter than ever with my held breath, my ears throbbed, my eyes throbbed, I stole away into the bright noon sun of that hapless Friday in midsummer. I flew to my room, as much as any inspired and terrified fat boy can fly, and for those few moments—mere sunlit suspended moments saved by a rotten washer in the right-hand faucet in the lavatory sink—for those extra moments of life he was none the wiser.

I ran to my room though I was not a quick child, ran with my short plump bare arms flung out in front of me and not a sob in my throat, not a snuffle in my little pink naked rosebud of a nose, so bent was I on staying his hand with my cello. And the sunlight, bright sunlight coming through every window in planes as broad as each sill and filled with motes and little stationary rainbows that warmed leg, knee, pudgy arm, home full of light and silence and suspended warmth. And only the two of us to share my Brahms.

The cello was under my bed and without thinking I flopped to my hands and knees and hauled it out, and then tumbled it onto my bed, turned back the corners of the old worn-out patchwork quilt in which my mother always wrapped that precious instrument. Cello in the sunlight, tiny shadows beneath the strings, wood that was only a shell, a thin wooden skin, but dark
and brown and burnished. The sunlight brought out the sheen of my cello—tiny concentric circles of crimson moons—brought out the glow of the thick cat strings. I stood there, put my palm on its thin hard belly, and already it was warm and rich and filled with my slow awkward song.

So I tightened the strings, tightened the bow and hugged the now upright cello and held my breath, trotted back silently-bulging sway-backed child, bouncing cello—to my lonely sunlit post by the locked door. And then—no noise, no noise—the terror of touching the cello’s middle leg to the floor and of resting the waxen neck in my shoulder and pressing down a string and raising the bow, flinging up the bow and staring at the keyhole and waiting, watching the keyhole, smiling, in silence holding everything ready for the song.

“Now, Papa,” I said suddenly, and there was a startled jumping sound behind the door, “now I am going to play!” And my arm fell and the bow dragged, sawed, swayed to and fro—hair on gut, fat fingertips on gut—and the cello and I rolled from side to side together. I kept my eyes on the little black hole in the door, with every ecstatic rhythmic roll crossed and recrossed my legs.

So I played for him, played Brahms while my father must have been loading the pistol, played while he swept an impatient and frightened hand through the gray thinning hair and made fierce eyes to himself behind the door. I played with no thought of him, really, but he must have gagged a little to himself in there, choked like a man coughing up blood for the first time as he tried to decide how best to use the nickel-plated weapon, forced his fingers inside the trigger guard. I suppose the first sounds of the cello must have destroyed the spell of the faucet. So I played on, phantom accomplice to his brutal act, and all the while hoping, I think, for success and pleased with the song.

And then: “Edward!”

Bow in mid-air. Silence, catch in my throat, legs locked. Because his voice was loud. He had gotten down on his knees and had put his mouth to the keyhole: “Edward,” he said firmly, “stop it!”

And then cello, legs, bow, myself, heart, Brahms, all locked
together for a moment of immobile frenzy because I heard the lock turn in the lavatory door and thought he was coming out to me.

“Edward! I have opened the door. There is no point in making someone break down the door to get me….”

So the bow swung free and again I was squatting, leaning close to the door: “But, Papa, may I come in then?”

The shot. The tiny acid stink at the keyhole. And the door opened slightly of its own accord, hung ajar so that I saw one twisted foot, trouser cuff jerked above the ankle, and my own release, my cry, my grief, the long shocked moment when I clung to the cello and heard the terrible noise and wondered when it would ever end. He may have spoken to me one last time—“Good-by, Edward”—but I couldn’t be sure. The shot, after all, killed everything.

Everything, that is, except my love. But if my own poor father was Death himself, as I think he was, then certainly I was right to tell Cassandra how familiar I was with the seeds of death. Wasn’t I myself, as a matter of fact, simply that? Simply one of those little black seeds of death? And what else can I say to Father, Mother, Gertrude, Fernandez, Cassandra, except sleep, sleep, sleep?

High lights of helplessness? Mere trivial record of collapse? Say, rather, that it is the chronicle of recovery, the history of courage, the dead reckoning of my romance, the act of memory, the dance of shadows. And all the earmarks of pageantry, if you will, the glow of Skipper’s serpentine tale.

Cinnamon, I discovered when I was tossed up spent and half-naked on the invisible shore of our wandering island—old Ariel in sneakers, sprite surviving in bald-headed man of fair complexion-cinnamon, I found, comes to the hand like little thin brown pancakes or the small crisp leaves of a midget tobacco plant. And like Big Bertha who calls to me out of the black forest of her great ugly face I too am partial to cinnamon, am always crumpling a few of the brittle dusty leaves in my pockets, rubbing it gently onto the noses of my favorite cows. And what better than cinnamon for my simmering dreams?

Yesterday, if I can trust such calculations in my time of no time, yesterday marked the end of Catalina Kate’s eighth month. Four weeks to go and right on time, and Kate has stretched and swelled and grown magnificently. My Kate with
a breadbasket as big as a house, tight as a drum, and the color of old brick and shiny, smooth and shiny, under the gaudy calico of that tattered dress. And wasn’t Sister Josie pleased? “Baby coming in four weeks, Josie,” I told her. And weren’t we all? But yesterday was also the day I knocked up Sweet Phyllis in the shade of the calabash tree. A big day, as I told Sonny, a big day all around.

“Cow’s calling, Skipper. Just hear if she ain’t!”

Dawn. The first moment of windy dawn, and the bright limes were dancing, the naked flesh hung down from the little cocoa trees, and already the ants were swarming. Red-eyed Sonny stood there—metamorphosed, waiting forever—among the broad leaves and shadows framed in my large white rotting casement. Sonny was waiting, yawning, rubbing his eyes in my view of the world.

“Cow’s calling for sure. And ain’t that Sweet Phyllis, Skipper? Sounds like Phyllis to me!”

“All right, Sonny,” leaning forward, scratching myself, smearing the ants, watching the shifting torso in my window, listening, “it’s all right,Sonny. She’ll wait.” I could hear the faint far-off appeal, the dumb strained trumpeting of Sweet Phyllis in heat. She sounded ecstatic, was making a brassy sustained noise of grief. Sonny had a good ear.

“Tell Big Bertha to fix us a lunch, Sonny. We might as well make a day of it. And tell Bertha that she and Kate and Josie may come along if they’d like to. Fair enough?”

“Oh, they’ll want to come along, Skipper,” grinning, shifting softly and erratically in the window with his arms pressed tight to the long thin torso and somehow active, up to something, though in no way suggesting his intention to be off, to be gone about my business, “them girls wouldn’t miss a hot fete for Phyllis if you allows them the privilege and lets them get off from work. Skipper, you knows that!”

The old smashed petty officer’s cap this time, the indecent angle of the cap, the long shrunken torso like a paste of hickory ash and soot, the fixed grin, the unshaved black jaw working. “Well, Sonny,” I said, “how about it? Are you going to tell Big
Bertha what I told you?” And then, listening, watching, returning his grin: “Sonny,” I said softly, “Sonny, are you relieving yourself against Plantation House? Under my very window, Sonny? You have no scruples. You have no scruples at all.”

And shaking his head in pretended pain, showing me that long wry black face and contorting his brows, blinking: “That’s right, Skipper,” he said, “I don’t have none of that scruples stuff. No, sir!”

So that’s how yesterday began, with the live sounds of the calling cow and Sonny’s water. It ended after dark with a bath, one of the prolonged infrequent sandy sea-splashing baths for Sonny and myself. And in between, only our little idyl down with the cow. Only the five of us in the shade of the calabash tree with Phyllis. And the girls, as Sonny called them, added their charms to the cows’ and enjoyed our little slow pastoral down in the overgrown field with Phyllis and Alma and Edward and Freddy and Beatrice and Gloria. More water, of course, and a little song and so many soothing hands and a nap on a pile of green calabashes and the taste of guava jam, it couldn’t have been a better time for Phyllis, a better time for us.

“All right,” I said, “everyone here? Now let’s not have a lot of noise. I don’t want you making a lot of noise and frightening that cow. You hear? I don’t want to get kicked.” And then I started off, leading the way. And Sonny in the old chief’s cap and ragged white undershorts followed, and then Big Bertha with our lunch on her head in an iron pot, and then beautiful sway-backed Kate and Sister Josie, who in her mauve hood and cowl, long mauve skirts hiding her little black shoes, loved all the wild cows and mockingbirds and indecent flowers. In a long single file and in that colorful order they followed me through the bush, and I was the Artificial Inseminator of course, and in one hand I carried the little black tettered satchel and in the other hand swung Uncle Billy’s crucifix. A slow languid single-file progress through the bush with the women jabbering and the orchids hanging down from the naked Indian trees and Sonny slapping flies and the sun, the high sun, piercing my old white Navy cap with its invisible rays. And I swayed, I swung myself
from side to side, opened up our way along that all-but-obliterated cow path on the saw-toothed ridge among the soft hibiscus and poisoned thorns and, yes, the hummingbirds, the little quick jewels of my destiny. From the frozen and crunchy cow paths of the Atlantic island—my mythic rock in a cold sea —to this soft pageant through leaf, tendril, sun, wind, how far I had come.

“Got to go a little faster now,” I said, and raised the dripping satchel so they could see it, “must hurry it up a little, Sonny and young ladies, or the ice will melt.”

And from the other side of the ridge and on the floating air she was calling us, Sweet Phyllis, was holding her quarters rigid and sticking her nose through the calabash leaves and blaring at us, blaring forth the message of her poor baffled fertility. It was a signal of distress, a low-register fire horn, and I recognized more than Sweet Phyllis’s voice drifting over the ridge.

“You hear it, Big Bertha?” I said, “hear it, Kate? And you, Sister Josie, do you hear it too? They’re all calling now. Alma and Beatrice and Gloria and Edward and Freddy—hear them calling? They’ve gotten the idea from Phyllis, eh? All of them think it is time for a hot fete, even the steers. Isn’t that so, Josie?”

 Little black Josie, old Bertha with the pot on her head, my dusty rouge-colored pregnant Kate with her club of dark hair hanging down to her breast and her belly slung down and forward near the end of her time—they giggled, each one of them, and pointed at the wet shirt clinging to my enormous back, pointed at the dripping satchel. I smelled them—little nun, old cook, mother-to-be—and knew that they were in a processional, after all, and that each one of them was capable of love in her own way.

“The way things is going, Skipper, old Sonny’s about to start a little calling of his own any minute now. I just feels a big call catching right here in this skinny throat of mine. Got to bellow it out any minute, Skipper, damn if I don’t.”

“You want to call too, Sonny,” I said. “Why not? A little calling wouldn’t hurt you. It’s the hammock that’s bad for you, Sonny. Too much time in the hammock is bad.”

And I laughed, glanced over my shoulder—Sonny flopping along in his unbuckled combat boots, Sonny pulling up his drawers—and the three dark women were watching us and listening. Love at last, I thought, and I thrashed out onto a small golden promontory above the field. Blue sky, bright pale blue of a baby’s eye, our golden vantage point, the field below; and in the center of the field the dark low sprawling shape of our deep green tree, and under the tree the cows—two steers, four heifers, six young beauties in all—and in the branches of the tree, which were tied together, knotted together like tangled ribbons in a careless head of hair, the birds, a screeching and wandering tribe of birds that were drawn to Phyllis’s song like ourselves and now swarmed in the tree. Love at last. I smiled over my shoulder and we started down.

To the last we held our single file. To the last we maintained our evenly spaced formation, our gentle steps, delicate order, significant line. Tennis shoes filled with burrs, white trousers tom, old rakish and rotting white cap, shreds of once-white shirt plastered to my mahogany breast and back, and except for these I was naked. Sniffing the sweet air and keeping my chin lifted, and swaying, riding slowly forward at a heavy contented angle I, Skipper, led the way. I knew the way, was the man in charge—the AI—and there was no mistaking me for anything but the leader now, and they were faithful followers, my entourage. Down we went, and the tennis shoes and combat boots and little black pointed shoes from the missionary’s museum and two other lovely pairs of naked feet hardly touched the earth, hardly made a sound, surely left no prints in the soft wild surface of the empty field. It was a long slow day with the cows, a picnic under the calabash tree, a gentle moment, a pastoral in my time of no time.

We maintained our places in line up to the very tree itself, and then one by one and without breaking file we stopped and folded aside the tender branches, one by one entered the shade, joined the loud animals in the din of the birds. The spot I chose for entering was not an arm’s length from Sweet Phyllis’s dripping nose which was thrust through the leaves and sniffing us. 
giving the sound of desire to our approach. But she was not frightened. And as soon as I entered that grove of shade I rested my hand on her shoulder, thrust my own nose through the leaves, was just in time to watch Kate take the last twenty or thirty steps of our amorous way.

She was like a child, like a young girl, because despite her weight and swayed back, despite sore muscles and the rank sweat on her exotic brow, she was taking those last steps with her hands held behind her back—backs of her hands nesting in the small of her back—and with her elbows held out like wings, and she was waggling her elbows, tossing her head, taking light happy strides on her naked toes. It was a sinuous slow-motion seductive cantering, the heavy oblivious dance of my young Kate. Despite the water under her skin. Despite the big precious baby inside the sac.

“Come along, Catalina Kate,” I cried, “I’m watching you!” And then we were all together and the bellowing stopped, the birds simmered down, Bertha wedged the iron pot into the above-ground roots of the tree, and I—humming, musing, stripping off the rags of my shirt—I squatted and opened my official black satchel and removed the little sad chunk of ice, deposited the little smooth half-melted piece of ice in the lip of the spring that was a black puddle among the lesser roots at the far edge of the tree. And carefully—down on my knees, smiling—I took the little glass bottle from the satchel and weighed it in my hand—a mere nothing in the hand, but life, the seeds of life—and stood it carefully on the chunk of ice. Safe now. No worry now. I could take my time.

“See there, Kate? That’s Oscar. Oscar in the little bottle, Kate! For Sweet Phyllis, do you understand?”

And smiling, glancing at the bottle, glancing at me, fixing the shiny black club of plaited hair between her young breasts and indifferent to the sweat that trickled down her bare throat and down her arms, down the sides of her young face and even into the comers of her dark eyes, she said softly: “Oh, yes, sir, Kate know what you mean.”

“Good girl,” I said, “I’m glad.” And then: “Well, what about
it, Bertha, time to eat? Poor Sonny looks pretty hungry to me!”

So while the spring kept Oscar cool, the five of us sprawled close together and held out our hands to the fat black arm that disappeared inside the pot and came up dripping. Calypso herself couldn’t have done better. Sweet guavas and fat meat that slid into the fingers, made the fingers breathe, and crushed leaves of cinnamon on the tongue and sweet shreds of coconut. We ate together under the dark speckled covering of the tree, sprawled together, composed, with no need for wine, and the cows stood about and nosed us and a blackbird flew down and sat on Sonny’s cap. We ate together among the smooth green oval calabashes that were as large as footballs, and lay among the calabashes and licked our fingers. I told Josie to take off her shoes—“Take them off, Josie,” I said, “you have my permission.” And while she was trying to unfasten the little knotted strings Edward took it into his head to jump up on Sweet Phyllis and the bird hopped wildly about on Sonny’s cap. And my namesake—reluctantly I say that name, reluctantly admit that name—left bright thick gouts of mud on each of Sweet Phyllis’s soft yellow flanks.

And Sister Josie spoke. Holding the tiny broken-heeled shoes in her lap and poking a little naked foot from under the madness of the mauve skirts, at last she felt the need to speak, to speak to me: “Edward trying to walk down the road on Phyllis, sir?”

“Of course he is, Josie,” I said softly, “of course he is.”

“Walk down the road for babies?”

“Yes, Josie. That’s what he wants.”

So we ate out of Bertha’s pot, watched Edward jumping up, watched Freddy using his nose for life—“See how he goes at it, Kate,” I said, “no holding him back”—Freddy ramming his head straight out and nuzzling, drawing back his lips, that famished steer, and snuffling and waving marvelous long streamers from his glazed bubbling nose. And in our lazy heap we noticed idly that Alma and Beatrice and Gloria were playing tricks with their tails or trying to mount each other or one of the steers.

“Poor Alma,” I said. “She looks like Pagliacci, don’t you think so, Sonny? But look there, Sonny, when Beatrice tops Gloria
and then Gloria tops Beatrice you really have something, don’t you, Sonny? Divine confidence, isn’t that it? Blessed purpose anyway, eh? And who’s to say nothing will come of it?”

They planted their hoofs among our legs—sticky hoofs, outstretched legs—and they lowered their brown eyes on us, and Gloria licked my cheek and Beatrice even lay down next to little Josie, cow’s head next to cowled head, breaths mingling.