In An Arid Land Page 2

  The Old One is in the tent, snoring. From my folding chair I can hear him over the night sounds of the surf, and it is somehow endearing to me and comforting.

  "Better keep an eye on him," he mumbled before he went to bed, which is what I have done more or less, dozing and waking and watching. Long after midnight and he's still out there, on the first sandbar, casting out and reeling in, casting out and reeling in, trying to hit Florida, a dark irregularity in the triangular gloss of reflected moonlight, a human chink in a piece of finely wrought silver made beautiful by the imperfection.

  At last I rouse myself and carry my folding chair out to the very edge of the water. I smoke cigarettes I shouldn't smoke, drink a beer I shouldn't drink, find the Big Dipper, imagine for a while, and then, growing bored with its simple design, I wish I were a smarter man who knew the positions and configurations of other constellations so that I could find them, too, and imagine even more. Off in the distance, beyond the jetties, the fat old dredge in the channel shines like a small city, its red and white lights speaking of other humans hereabout, rough working guys doing their jobs all through the night, reminding me that we are never, in the modern world, as remote as we'd like to think.

  I am, on the whole, terrified of dark water. There are wily sharks out there and jellyfish and stingrays and killer currents and no telling what else, and I am amazed, still, that my friend does not share this terror. Friendship, like love, I think, is one of the grand mysteries. Who knows what brings strangers together and drives comrades apart? Living with the mystery takes courage, I know, the courage to stand in dark water and to cast your line toward Florida, the courage to hope that, in spite of yourself, ignoring the odds, you just might catch something.

  Back in camp I take our Prize Rope out of the Jeep and then I fumble around until I find my rod and my bait can. Dragging the rope, I walk out into the water until it's lapping at my thighs. A sneaky chill wriggles across my back and I have to stop. The trench is just before me, deep and hidden and fearful, and it takes me a moment to plunge in. When I do I go ahead quickly, kicking through the water, trailing the heavy rope behind, until I'm up safely on the sandbar and making my way toward Eddie.

  When I'm close enough to hear, he calls out above the waves, "Been wondering when you'd show up." His voice is eerie-sounding, louder now and more distinct, out here in the watery void.

  "Well I've never much cared for bathing with sharks."

  I can see him smile in the moonlight, his teeth shining like phosphorescent gems. He's glad to see me, and I'm glad I came.

  "What's that?" he says, noticing the rope.

  "This, my friend, is our lifeline," I say. "Here, put this loop around your waist."

  At first he laughs, says, "What?!" but when he sees I'm serious he does what he's told. We take turns holding our gear as the other one slips the rope over his head and slithers into it, a slow clumsy business. It's a heavy weight, but the water buoys the rope somewhat and when it's done I feel better.

  "Why don't you take over for a while, I'm tired out."

  "Have you caught anything?"

  "Naw," he says. "Will though, I've had nibbles."

  I dig into my can and pull out a shrimp, bait my hook, prick my finger in the process and worry that I'm bleeding, calling the sharks in for dinner. I cast out, let the sinker settle to the bottom, the way it ought to be done. My plan is to do it right, thinking if I catch something for him maybe he'll give it up, get some rest. Slowly I reel in, letting it settle, dragging it in, but I come up with nothing. So I cast out and try again.

  As if it's the next line in a long conversation, he says, "You know what she told me the day she left for Albuquerque?" and he looks at me as if this is significant, something I need to know. "She said I can still hear her voice like she was standing right there where you are she said, 'It is possible I will miss you when I leave."'

  We give off looks full of injury and confusion, but I don't know what to say to him, don't know what to do, don't know why he told me that, so I reel in my bait and cast out again. Thinking about it, imagining his misery, I find myself reeling in without any thought of catching fish. I want to say something, I want to sound wise and brotherly, but I've never been any good at that sort of thing and when I open my mouth nothing comes out.

  "It-is-possible,"I hear him say again, emphasizing each word, trying to understand them, I guess, dwelling on it, "I-will-miss-you . . ." and he pauses here, " . . . when-I leave. "

  We are quiet for a while as the waves roll through us, holding our rods tightly in our hands, glancing at each other.

  "I've been out here all day," he says. "And what I can't figure out is why anybody that once loved you, once shared everything with you, why she would ever say something like that to you." He looks over. He says, "You got any ideas?"

  "No," I say, and it's the truth. I wish I did, I wish I had all kinds of ideas, but I don't and he knows I don't.

  I cast out and reel it in, without method, without purpose, moving down the sandbar to get away from him since I don't want to hear any more. What good is such talk? When I'm out of hearing range, and the rope, our lifeline, is stretched to its fullest, I look back, keeping an eye on him as the Old One has asked me to. I can see his white Turkey Trot tee shirt glowing in the moonlight and his big head low against his chest and I think perhaps he is weeping. It would have been better, I think, if he hadn't said anything, hadn't mentioned Marcia's last words to him, words uttered in haste and anger and meant to hurt him, which they did, and then did again. But heartbreak is like that, I know.

  I tug on the rope, gently, rhythmically, so he won't know it's not the waves doing the tugging, just enough to draw him off balance and away from his thoughts, and he seems to come out of the spell. Presently he lifts his rod and he turns and he heaves his sinker out into the dark churning waves, and, because this is why I have come, I do the same, and then we both reel in, quite deliberately, keeping our eyes on some invisible spot out there, and this goes on and on, on and on for a long time; we cast out and reel in, cast out and reel in, catching nothing, as the sharks and the stingrays and the jellyfish swim menacingly around us, as the killer currents conspire against us, as the moon ducks its big white eye below the dunes behind us, all through the blind mysterious hours, while the Prize Rope tugs at our waists, keeping us close, until, with the first pale sheen of sunrise, we can see once again just where we are, see once again the danger we have passed through together.

  THE LOST EARRING

  Angelica wakes in the night and in the blue milky sheen of the moon's thin rays she sees a strange luminescent figure in the room with her. At first she is frightened; at first she reaches up a hand to protect herself. But then the common sense of the conscious mind says No no, it is only Miguel come to me for comfort after a bad dream.

  He waits at the foot of the bed, small as his father was small, erect and stern and ghostly. His nightshirt with the cartoon fighting turtles on the front glows in the eerie moonlight. His eyes are dark sockets, his nose sharp as a jagged stone. And for a moment then he is the image and the essence of his father come to speak to her, come to explain himself, come to advise her perhaps. She has hundreds of questions, he must have all kinds of stories to tell of his adventures. But again the common sense of the conscious mind overrules longing, and again she sees it is only her son standing there.

  She says, "What is it, Miguel, what is wrong?"

  He says nothing; he only stares. A long moment passes before he moves: around the footboard and up onto the bed in one fluid motion, swift and graceful. He buries his head in the hollow between arm and breast and clamps a hand on her body as if to keep her from floating away.

  "What scared you? What has happened? Is Gabe all right?"

  He is slow to answer; what he has to say will startle and alarm and even frighten again.

  "What was it, sweetheart, a dream?"

  "No," he says, mumbling into the soft hollow of his mother's body. "No, it
was you. You were talking again."

  "Oh, I see. And what did I say?"

  "You said, 'Hold me . . ."

  "That's all?"

  "The rest I couldn't listen to."

  She imagines her voice slipping out the door cracks and through the walls to his small room and creeping up to his small bed and entering his small ears and she knows in that instant the same panic he must have felt. She apologizes and coos to him, tells him it's all right now, he can sleep here in her big bed and if she speaks out again he will know it is nothing.

  "Just wake me up. Say 'hush, Mama, hush!' It is nothing, just something that happens sometimes."

  He seems relieved; his breathing calms.

  Neither of them sleeps again.

  When Jorge disappeared in a plane crash (deep in the mountains of Venezuela where he had gone to write a profile of a promising minor-league ballplayer) Angelica saw it for a while as a kind of death for herself as well, a spiritual death, as if a vital part of her had been cut out and sent flying into Purgatory. She hated everything and everybody, for what is the loss of the beloved if not the loss of the faculty to love?

  They had been together so long, for one thing eighteen years. Their mature lives were completely tangled up together, always, like two snakes in a cage. And there were the boys Miguel, nine, Gabriel, six. It had not been easy, those years, with the waiting, the trying (she conceived with difficulty) and the difficult births. And so little money then for shoes, for toys, for even the necessities some months, though toward the end they had sensed a change. A nest egg in the bank, at last a new car, talk of buying a house. At thirty-nine her life had just begun to assume a concrete form, a heft and weight of its own, a settled feeling that would have carried her well into old age.

  She took to her bed. She existed only in the internal passageways, the internal landscapes of grief and loneliness. The grandmothers, both in far distant cities, each kept one of the boys during that time of chaos. Then one day her mother appeared. Bastante es bastante, Angelica. Take a hold now. You are a woman with responsibilities. Do you think you are the first woman to lose her husband? All of this in the shrill chastising voice of a mother's frustration and wisdom. Her own husband, Angelica's father, had been a drunk who died on a dusty street; she had raised four children alone and had not raised them to be weaklings. Get up from there and get on with it.

  She did. They were understanding at the university where she works as the Minority Recruitment Officer. They like her, respect her; they wanted her back. And the boys came home. But she couldn't stay anymore in the little house on Laredo Street where Jorge's voice even now sounded in her memories. So she found another, same rent but even nicer, larger, with two small rooms upstairs for the boys and her own room below. It was here, she told herself, that she would start her life over.

  Angelica goes to her new landlady's house to get the key and pay the rent. The landlady is the daughter of the old man whose house she is taking now, now that his wife is dead and he can no longer tend to his affairs. He lives with the daughter in a fine old place just a few blocks from the house Angelica is renting.

  He is sitting at the kitchen table when Angelica arrives. The daughter, a slim woman with graying hair, is nervous but friendly. She has never been a landlady before, never had an old one to care for, and she is uncertain just how to go about it.

  The viejito is very old. He sits at the table with his hands folded in his lap. He wears baggy trousers and a baggy shirt; his feet are bare. His head is bald but for thin silvery patches on the sides above his long purple ears, and the skin is splotched. His face is thin, the cheeks sunken, the chin gray with days' old stubble, but his eyes are brilliant and blue.

  He looks at Angelica fiercely, directly, almost aggressively with those brilliant blue eyes, as if she is an interloper or a loved one who has disappointed. In fact he stares at her quite rudely until the daughter says, "Papa? Papa!" in a loud voice. "Papa, don't be so rude, don't stare at our guest."

  His eyes blink but his gaze does not shift or change.

  "He hasn't been quite the same since Mother died," the daughter says to Angelica. "They were together forty-seven years, you see, and he remembers too well at times, the old days, and he forgets too well sometimes tooisn't that right, Papa?"

  "Yes!" the old man says to quiet his daughter's prattle and then suddenly he changes, he softens. Looking softly at Angelica, he asks, "Did you ever find that earring you lost in the bedroom, the pearl I gave you as a wedding present?"

  He smiles now as if speaking in fondness his blue eyes dance a bit; there is something playful and lusty and familiar in them and he tilts his head awaiting an answer. It is all incredible and disquieting to Angelica, this question, this coincidence. Not long ago she did indeed lose an earring, much cherished, and she couldn't find it when packing to move. She knows though; she knows he is not truly speaking to her but to that other woman whose house and bedroom he shared all those years.

  "Papa," says the daughter in her embarrassment, touching his arm, "this is not Mama, this is Angelica," and yet the old man waits and smiles expecting an answer.

  Angelica smiles too now and says, because he wants her to be the woman he thinks she is, "No, I didn't find it. It's still lost, there in the bedroom somewhere."

  He is very pleased by her answer. His smile changes, deepens to one of regret and compassion and resignation to the unknown parts of life, the elusive ways of small hidden things. There is a touch of pity too, and even more, something else.

  "So then," he says with a kind of masculine decisiveness. "I'll have to have a look later. My eyes are better than yours."

  "Yes," she says. "They always have been."

  "Hah! That's true, I got the eyes, you got the ears and the bazoobs," he says, eyes blazing and playful, tongue showing lewdly between his teeth, and without a hint of shame he cups his hands and moves them vaguely before his chest.

  "You should know," says Angelica in a lilting, teasing voice, almost laughing now at their game.

  The old man rolls his eyes and tosses his head he is nearly ecstatic now with joy and delight and then he flops back in his chair. He lets out one loud laugh.

  The daughter is mystified and a bit mortified by this conversation between her father and this stranger. She glances at Angelica with a look that says, Don't encourage him, please.

  "He gets confused at times," she says. Then: "Papa? Papa, would you like to take a walk?" Then: "He likes to walk through the neighborhood. Everyone knows him. They understand. He even goes back to the old house at times for a look, just a look."

  "I see," says Angelica. And then to the old man: "Stop in anytime, Mr. Morris, we'd love to have you."

  He seems to comprehend this, to be of this world again, and he eyes her again in that direct, almost aggressive way of his.

  The daughter says, "Papa? Well yes, why don't you take a walk. But you'll have to put your shoes on, Papa, and your hat."

  Angelica writes out a check as the daughter gets him up and helps him prepare. She guides him out the door and sends him down the drive to the sidewalk. Back inside she apologizes for her father, makes excuses for his age and the loss of his mind.

  "You must look familiar to him," the daughter says. "Mother had black hair too, and wore glasses."

  Angelica takes the key to her new house and leaves.

  The old man, tall but stooped under his floppy hat, his trousers dragging the pavement of the sidewalk, his cane tapping, is halfway down the block when she drives by. She waves but he does not look up.

  It's late October now and the leaves are changing. The town is canopied in bright shades of yellow and red. The air is crisp, easy to inhale. On the front doors of the houses in the neighborhood hang plastic images of jack-o-lanterns, skeletons, witches. In the weeks since Angelica and the boys moved in to the house life has passed peacefully and well. They have settled in, made a home with their things around them and their routines re-established. But today so
mething is wrong, something is up.

  The boys sense it as a danger. She was late to pick them up at the day care, spanked Gabe over nothing and in the car there is an ominous silence. By the time they reach the house the boys are frightened of her mood and go to their rooms to play alone.

  She believes she can trace what is wrong, trace it to its origins. For lunch that day she went with several colleagues to the Union. There were six of them, four women and two men. They talked shop, complained and commiserated. It was pleasant and relaxing and they were all cheerful when they got up to leave.

  But one of them, a man named Alfred who works in Admissions, a nice man, heavyset and bearded, with curly graying hair and a tiny, tiny nose, a gentle man Alfred asked her to wait a moment, he wanted to speak to her. The others grinned among themselves and as they were leaving they glanced back with knowing eyes.

  Alfred, who has always been rather formal with her, said he had been meaning to speak to her for several weeks but had wanted to avoid seeming "pushy and unfair to Jorge." He wanted to know if she would "consent," it is the very word he used, to his asking her out to dinner. He thought enough time had passed and there was no point in their both being alone so often. Alfred is divorced and has a daughter he sees on weekends. He is known as a good man, an honorable man, a conscientious man, even if he is heavyset and slow of speech and just slightly on the ugly side. She has known him for many years now and has always liked him.