The Boy in His Winter (16 page)

Am I afraid?

I’m afraid to think about it—now that I am eighty-five and failing.

James and I walked from the St. Andrew Bay marina into Panama City. We left the brothers to wrangle over money and Edmund’s refusal to moderate his drinking. Edgar worried that an instant of drunken uproar would bring the police. His elaborate theater of normality could
be undone by a bottle hurled through the windscreen of a nearby boat or a volley of obscenity aimed at a woman on the dock. A pretty girl dressed in three lilac triangles had already caught his brother’s eye while she walked her Pekinese past the cockpit. Edmund’s sullen boozing seemed to increase with every mile. Two days earlier, he’d set fire to a saloon chair after falling asleep lipping a cigarette. Fortunately, we’d been out of sight of land, although the black smoke could have brought a Coast Guard cutter down on us. James was nervous—this man who was the embodiment of calm. Whether the cause was the impending reunion or Edmund’s mutiny, I couldn’t decide. Sophie and her mother lived in a low-income apartment house called Edgewater Garden, and we were expected there for dinner. But first, James insisted I get my hair cut.

“You look like hell, Mr. Albert,” he said, ruffling my hair affectionately.

I never liked to be touched—especially in those days when the only person who had ever laid a hand on me was Pap, with force enough to smart. Anybody else but James would have felt my own hand’s angry reflex. But I’d sensed in his touch only kindness and so let it pass. My hair really must have looked a mess: uncut, unkempt, unbrushed, and clean only because of the showers I took twice a day aboard the
Psyched.
I was learning to adore showers, sheets, and contrivances like a machine that washed the dirty clothes. The twenty-first century is a vast improvement over the nineteenth, I thought; and when James admitted he’d never heard of castor oil, I was converted to modernity.

He led me into a “colored” barbershop. There was no more Jim Crow—not even in Mississippi—but the color bar had yet to fall where men went for a haircut and a shave.
Segregated by reason of the intimacy of human hair and whiskers (abhorrent to some), a barbershop was a kind of private club where you could get whiskey, news, or even place a bet. I’d never been inside one and was intoxicated by the smell of shaving soap, wintergreen, sweet clipper oil, and eau de cologne, which a barber—a smart-looking gent with a thin mustache—rubbed into the crinkled hair of a man beside me. I sank luxuriously inside my blue-striped bib while my barber—bald and asthmatic—sought out James’s eyes in the mirror for his tonsorial instructions. And then while he pumped a pedal near the floor, I levitated!

“Cut it all the hell off,” said James, “and send the cooties to the museum of natural science.”

The barber laughed and turned the clippers on. They growled once, then buzzed into life. He ran them deftly through my hair. I watched it fall, in heavy lanks of dirty blond. When he’d finished cutting and powdering my neck with talc, he swept “my glory” down a hole.

“Where’s it go?” I asked, indicating with my itching nose the hole, like a trapdoor in the magic show I had seen with Tom Sawyer when we sneaked aboard the
White Cloud
the year before she sank at St. Louis.

“I sell it to the ‘wig man,’” he said, and with a flourish, he twitched off my bib, whisked the cut hair from face and neck, stepped on the pedal, which brought me down to earth, and spun the chair toward the mirror—all in one fluent motion. In that motion, I saw—as I do always when watching practiced hands ply their trade—grace. Don’t you find it so?

James paid the barber; I heard the register ring, the cash drawer shut with force enough to make bottles of hair tonic on the counter chime. I heard a barking dog outside and fell
suddenly all the way back to Hannibal, to the shack where I’d lived with Pap. A barking dog—so slight and melancholy a thing—is a thread on which my memories, planets of my revolving days, are strung. To hear that bark recalls me sadly to the lengthening river of my years. It is a time machine that depends only on the human wish to visit what is gone.

James and I stepped out into the glaring afternoon and turned north onto Balboa Avenue. He didn’t saunter the way he usually would to prove a nonchalance and superiority, but dragged along as if slowed by an invisible anchor. I guessed he was scared at the prospect of meeting Sophie.

“It’s been nearly three years since I saw my girl,” he said. “I wonder if she’ll even remember me.”

I said nothing, unqualified to speak to the loneliness and guilt of absent fathers. I was a boy, after all, regardless of my years and my bitterness toward my own pap.

“You know, Mr. Albert,” he said, abruptly casting off his pensiveness, “you’re still unfit to be seen in public. What you need next are some new threads.”

I made no objection when he took my arm and steered us into a department store, its big plate-glass windows boarded over in the wake of Katrina. The threads I wore were those I’d found inside the crate, which had delivered me safely—remember—to the Venice
necropolis
.

No, I like the word! It gives distinction to a common graveyard. It makes me hopeful of a flourishing civilization after death, even if a somber one. I picture silent throngs minding their own business in a city of the dead, with streets and marble buildings, graveled paths and benches where shades sit and feed pigeons with crumbs. Real pigeons, real crumbs! I like it better than a picture of tombstones, like headboards for beds of clay and grass, in
rows, reminding me of the children’s ward where I recovered from a fever during my reform school years. We’ll get to them in due course.

James chose a shirt—a gaudy thing bright with parrots—and a pair of loud Bermuda shorts. I tried on leather sandals and a yellow baseball hat. In the changing booth, I saw myself with a shock of
un
recognition, which staggered me. I’d seen my face before then: in mirrors on the boat and in the barbershop and long, long ago in shining puddles after rain. I remember coming upon my face, suddenly and for the first time, in a looking glass on Miss Watson’s dressing table. But I must not have really
seen,
not with fresh eyes and a newly minted gaze. It may have been the clothes and the haircut. But I felt a dispossession and dared not leave the changing booth, for fear I’d leave my face and self in the mirror. Children become philosophers when standing in front of mirrors. They invent worlds and stories there.

“Albert! Are you done admiring yourself?” James called from the dressing room door.

I broke the thread of my stare, turned from the mirror, and went outside in my new clothes.

“You took your time,” he said.

What a funny expression! As though time were mine or anyone else’s to take.

James paid the cashier. I dumped my old clothes and shoes into a plastic bag. On the street, James looked his old self once more. Jaunty and swaggering, he walked briskly toward his Sophie.

Edgewater Gardens had neither water nor gardens, although there was a dusty palm tree whose roots had lifted and cracked the sidewalk during the hurricane; and there were bushes full of birds I heard but never saw. We went
inside the brick building, climbed to the second floor; James knocked on a door, and in a moment Sophie opened it.

“Are you my dad?” she asked ingenuously.

“I am,” he said, unsure of what to do with his feet except to shuffle them in the dust.

The girl’s mother appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel, which smelled of shrimp.

“Come on in!”

If James had worried about his welcome, he needn’t have. She—her name was Camille—smiled warmly at him. Her skin made me think of copper and syrup. A bruise-colored butterfly hovered where her ample breast began to swell above the halter top. When she smiled at me, I saw she had a “valentine tooth” like James’s. Perhaps in Trinidad, troths were pledged with gold-clad teeth instead of rings. I looked at her hand; she wore a cultured pearl on her finger, but not a wedding band. I don’t know whether she and James were married. I never asked.

We went into the kitchen and sat, without a prelude of drinks, peanuts, and small talk in the living room. Without asking, she ladled peppery jambalaya into our bowls. We ate and talked all at once. Afterward, she carried the dirty bowls into the kitchen, singing a Calypso song, while James poked foolishly at the girl, who laughed. Camille brought us more beer. The ice-cold bottles sweat and beaded; the bent bottle caps made a pleasant heap. Sophie got up on her toes and danced. I said little. What did I know of this life?

“I’ve got a present for you,” James said, giving the girl the package he’d lugged all the way from the boat.

She tore the pink tissue paper from a walnut music box.

“Take it into the front room to play with,” he said. “Mr. Albert, you go with her.”

I followed Sophie into the living room while James led Camille into her bedroom.

The box unfolded into a stage for a tiny ballerina painted gold. Sophie wound a key, and the little figure danced one half of a Tchaikovsky pas de deux, her body reflected in a suite of mirrors. Sophie and I lay on the floor, her chin resting against her palm, my cheek against my arm. I couldn’t take my eyes from the golden figurine turning in the row of mirrors, lit by an accidental slant of light that had traveled across a gulf of space as if with no other thought than to make my eyes grow heavy, my eyelids droop and close until I’d fallen into a trance.

Tom Sawyer had told me how, in a St. Louis music hall where an uncle had taken him and Sid for a birthday treat, a mentalist in a stovepipe and black frock coat tried to hypnotize him with a gold watch twisting on its chain in a sickly light cast by gas brackets. Tom was a difficult subject, he told me proudly on his return to Hannibal, able to resist the power of suggestion. Unlike my old friend, I have always been susceptible to another’s will.

Sophie was telling me how pretty the apartment was—all lit up with candles during the storm—when I fell asleep on the floor. Was it sleep? It reminds me of what used to happen to our minds when, as boys, we’d breathe deeply into a paper bag: Our eyes would go dark and sting, and we’d swoon.

“Do you want to see my titties?”

Becky Thatcher was undoing the buttons of her blouse.

“You’re Tom’s girl! Get away from me!”

“Albert! Albert, you’re dreaming!”

Somebody was shaking me. Tom. Tom, it wasn’t my fault—it was Becky’s doing.

“Wake up, Albert!”

I opened my eyes, to see Sophie kneeling next to me. Her blouse was buttoned. I’ve never been sure if it was she who’d wanted to show me her breasts, or Becky. Embarrassed by the knot of lust in my pants (Tom used to call it a “woody”), I ran outside. Night with its mockery of stars had begun to sift down over the town. I made up my pipe and smoked, wondering what it was, exactly, that James was doing to Camille and she to him. And all the men and women lying together under the roofs of Panama City (the wrecked roofs covered with tarps to keep out night and rain)—what was it that made them search one another out with their mouths and hands? Was it love or desire, human need or only fear?

“You all right, Mr. Albert?” James asked, sitting on the curb next to me.

The street was pitch-dark; the streetlights had not been restored since the storm, which had blown into me its turmoil and noise.

I nodded yes, mutely, in case my voice should shake.

“You know, Mr. Albert, this trip we’re making—it’s not good for you. They’re using you, those Connery boys. You’re part of a plan, Albert, to make us all look innocent. Do you know why we’re going to Atlantic City and why we stopped here? We’re delivering mail: marijuana, grass, doobie, weed, bud, cannabis, Mary Jane, kryptonite—call it what you like. The brothers thought a boy on board would make excellent camouflage. Edgar’s smart. He figured the best time to run the stuff from Mexico to AC was right after a big hurricane. Coast Guard, cops would be busy looking after people who lost their homes. They’d have New Orleans and the levees to worry about. We crossed over from Tampico and slipped into a bayou near Port Eads just before the storm broke. We hitched the boat nice and snug to some big trees; the boys
knew how to do it so she’d ride up on the surge without breaking up. Then we hunkered down inside an old cinder-block garage and waited it out. Afterward, it was like Edgar said: chaos and confusion. He’d everything figured, except his brother. I’m scared something bad’s going to happen, Mr. Albert, and I don’t want you getting hurt.”

I listened quietly, taking comfort in the smell of cherry smoke and the pipe’s taste of toasted corn cake. The stars hung over us like a spider’s silver web. I could hear, behind me, Zydeco music playing from the window of Camille and Sophie’s apartment. The moment was too rare for me to contemplate the brothers’ treachery.

“I’d like you to stay here, Albert.”

“Here?” I said, pausing in the contemplation of a cloud of tobacco smoke, which, instant by instant, was reconciling its contrarieties.

James nodded and went on. “I’ve asked Camille to take you in, and she’s agreed. She’s a good woman; she’ll treat you like her own. You can grow up with Sophie—live like an ordinary boy.”

Like an ordinary boy . . .

“Would you like that, Mr. Albert?”

I looked at James as Mary must have at the angel Gabriel. Can you imagine what his words meant, the altered life he’d organized and invoked? My resentment flared, but I dampened it at once. I realized this was not the moment for Roman candles of self-important rage. This man James had shown me what the world considers love. I cursed Pap for his folly in making me without it. Spellbound by his idea, James did not notice my mood’s alternations of light and dark. I drew on my pipe, blew another cloud, took it out of my mouth, and smiled my earnest thanks at him. But I was not ready to be civilized.