Whale Season Page 7

  And so now, Dagmar and Jesus are standing in front of the old Christmas tree, fidgety as children, patiently waiting for their photo to be taken. The tree looks just like the one at The Dream Café, silver branches and bubble lights. Uncle Joe bought them both in 1972. They’re only slightly tarnished.

  “Say salvation!” Jimmy Ray says. And they do. The flash blinds them all.

  Chapter 11

  Wild Turkey. Tapioca. The fire started without much trouble.

  Leon unwraps the boxes of old Christmas lights that he and Dagmar used on their wedding night. Twelve strands. Two hundred and forty bulbs. White and round as tiny snowballs. They were old even back then, and now they’re ancient. More than thirty years old. They’re leftover from Pettit’s All-Stars. After seeing a pictorial about Las Vegas in Life magazine, Lettie and Po strung them between the papier-mâché teeth of the entrance.

  “If you squint, it looks just like Caesar’s Palace,” Lettie said. Leon was only four years old, but remembers standing with Lettie and Po in the twilight, squinting, until it was dark and the mosquitoes came thick as clouds.

  “Damn it, if you squint it still looks just like Caesar’s Palace,” Leon now tells Clyde. “Everybody used to say that Pettit’s had a certain Vegas feel to it.”

  Being a six-foot-tall stuffed brown bear, a masterwork in taxidermy, Clyde doesn’t respond. Leon’s dressed him in an old leather jacket and Ray-Bans. Wants to make him look like Elvis. He’s not entirely successful.

  “Clyde, where did you put my dang hammer?”

  He’s also begun to talk to the stuffed bear and, now that Carlotta is gone, is thinking about getting him some wheels so that they can roll down to The Pink on Fridays and pick up women. “That’s ladies night,” he told Clyde with glee.

  Again, no response.

  Under the stack of newspapers piled on top of the built-in couch, Leon finds the hammer he’s been looking for. “You got to put things back where they belong,” he tells Clyde. “Or else things get out of control.”

  He takes another swig of Wild Turkey. Then files the bottle between Sunday’s comics for safekeeping. The extension cord he needs is plugged in, so he yanks it. The TV falls to the floor, bounces, pops, and splinters. Leon doesn’t care. Half a liter of Wild Turkey is already gone.

  Clyde seems to be scowling.

  “If you don’t like it,” Leon says. “Get your own place.”

  A load of clothes is spinning in the tiny stacked dryer in the corner of his bedroom. Carlotta threw everything in the mud. His shoes, socks, even the old jockstrap from high school that he didn’t remember he had. When Leon came home, everything he owned was tumbling down the front lawn toward the swamp.

  Gators hibernate, he kept telling himself as he waded into the dark water. They are totally asleep. But he knew that wasn’t quite true.

  Since all his clothes are either wet, or dirty, he stands on top of the waterbed, naked, unsteady, and slightly nauseated from too much of everything—especially himself.

  He wants to hang the lights, so he pounds roofing nails into the ceiling, winds the frayed cords around them. Some of the cords are worn thin, so thin they’re just bare wires. Leon’s so drunk, on the verge of passing out, he doesn’t notice. Starlight pours through the roof like cheese through a grater. He keeps on pounding. Wraps the lights around the skylight. Then he opens the latch and pops his head out. The air is salty and thick.

  “Nice night,” he says to Clyde. “A light chop off the Gulf.”

  Clyde isn’t much when it comes to talking about the weather, either. Leon leaves the skylight open. The cold salt air, its fragrant rot of fish, fills the room.

  When all the lights are finally up, all two hundred and forty of them, Leon, still naked, plugs in the extension cord. They snap to life for a moment. The trailer sky is filled with soft stars. The room is cold. Leon’s body is all goose bumps and pink flesh, but he doesn’t notice. He runs back to the couch, grabs the bottle of Wild Turkey he filed between “Hagar the Horrible” and “Prince Valiant.”

  “See, right where I left it,” he tells Clyde. “Got to have a system.”

  Whiskey in hand, Leon lies down on the waterbed and stares at the lights and the winking moon that shine down on him through the trailer’s open skylight. It reminds him of the smell of White Rain, the cotton candy of Dagmar’s hair. On their honeymoon, they came back to the trailer, strung the lights across the skylight, and made love until their lips were rubbed raw.

  “It’s like we’re in the ocean,” Dagmar said. “All salty and sweet. Making love under the stars.”

  Then he thinks of how the ocean turned on him, took Cal. Cal the sun baby. Tall for six. A good swimmer. “My son,” he says. He hasn’t said those words out loud in so long they creak.

  Leon hears sobbing as if it’s coming from another room. Tastes salt in his mouth. He wants another drink, damn ocean, but rolls onto his stomach instead. The bottle bobs up and down in his right hand. Facedown in the cool thick plastic of the waterbed, he’d like to smother himself but it seems like too much work.

  The lights above his head short and spark. Leon hears the fizzing. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees them flicker, then go out, but he doesn’t move. Facedown on the mattress, he opens his eyes and stares into the depths of the waterbed. He can’t see a thing. Needs goldfish, he thinks.

  The flashes of light remind him of the shooting stars he saw when he was a kid. They were real shooting stars, a whole family of them. The Flying Zucchinis. Human cannonballs who used to perform in the center of town. Grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, daughter, and son. One after the other, they’d climb into the long black cannon and shoot out over the church parking lot at fifty-six miles per hour.

  Their tiny silver jumpsuits. Their tiny silver capes. They were glamorous. They were made of star stuff.

  “Wahoo!” he’d scream.

  “Make a wish,” Mama Po would always say, and he would. He’d wish for a daddy who was spider-legged and softhearted and liked to play baseball.

  “Make a wish every chance you get, baby boy,” Mama Po said. So he did. Still does.

  Across the ceiling, the fire quietly burns along the strands of darkened Christmas lights. Crisscross and sparks. Flames run down the torn drapes and jump across to the piles of dirty clothes. Then there’s a loud pop.

  Shooting stars, he thinks. Then flips over like a pancake. “Oh,” he says when he sees the wall of flame his drapes have become. “I better put that out.” But he has no idea how. The fire is spreading quickly. For a moment, he is mesmerized by it. The water in the bed beneath him crests and falls. Somewhere in the back of his brain, Dagmar’s voice says, “Pay attention.” But, in a Wild Turkey haze, it’s difficult to pay attention; the room seems kind, filled with little tiny campfires.

  Leon rocks back and forth like an ocean liner.

  The fire picks up speed, races across the room, all smoke and spark.

  Pay attention, he thinks, but can’t. Leon claps his hands like they do on those commercials, trying to applaud the lights back to life. The fire spreads closer and closer to the bed. Smoke fills his mouth, his lungs. Pushes out the air. He coughs hard. Can hardly breathe. His goose bumps are gone. Gagging, he reaches out to his bottle of Wild Turkey. A flame licks his hand like an old dog, and then laps the line of whiskey that spills onto the floor, and then crawls up onto the sheets.

  He can hear Dagmar’s voice in his head, the midnight whisper of it.

  Pay attention.

  It is at this point that he thinks of the one thing he hadn’t thought of before.

  Propane.

  The fire slides under the door, and into the galley kitchen. The plastic of the waterbed grows warm underneath him. The tin roof flakes down on his head. He imagines what will happen when the fire spreads to the propane tank.

  Like The Flying Zucchinis.

  Coughing, his head shakes like maracas. He imagines himself soaring through the air, naked as trut
h. “She’d be real sorry,” he thinks, but the “who” is in question. Smoke and booze has melded Dagmar and Carlotta together in his mind.

  She’d be real sorry.

  Through the skylight, the cold night air rushes in, fuels the fire. Flames suddenly swell around Leon, singe the hair on his feet, his legs.

  “Dang, that smarts.”

  In his head, Dagmar is now screaming. It’s suddenly clear that the fire is past the stage where he can pee on it and put it out—which was more or less his plan a moment ago—so he picks up the blanket that’s been lying near his head. Wraps it around his waist and ties it tightly. “Clyde, you’re on your own,” he shouts and pulls himself onto the roof. Clyde remains stoic. The heat from the fire makes the roof hot. Leon jumps from foot to foot. The waterbed pops, extinguishes the floor.

  “Bye-bye, Clyde!”

  This is the point where Leon knows he should jump. And he would, but he’s afraid of heights. He just remembered that. Another plan ruined by logic. Dang.

  “Should have peed on that fire while I had the chance,” he says and adds that to the growing list of regrets in his life. Below his feet, he can hear popping, the fire exploding forgotten cans of furniture wax, spray starch. Pretty soon, the propane will go. There’s not much time.

  He looks over the edge, the ground spins a bit. It’s not far to jump, not really. The worst that could happen is that he could break a leg. Or snap my neck, he thinks.

  The metal roof is so hot his feet are blistering.

  Dagmar’s cries come back to him. Pay attention.

  So he does. Finally. He tells himself he is a skyrocket, a shooting star better than The Flying Zucchinis—higher, faster. The stars seem so close he could eat them like buttered popcorn.

  And so he jumps.

  And the propane blows.

  And he doesn’t forget to make a wish.

  Chapter 12

  Right before they began cooking Christmas dinner, Jimmy Ray convinced Jesus to put on one of his suits. It was fifty-eight degrees outside, wind out of the North, a cold snap. “Heat’s not too good in the house,” he told him. “You must be pretty drafty in that thing.” He was. It didn’t take too much convincing.

  Jimmy Ray’s walk-in closet looked like the Men’s Department at Saks Fifth Avenue. Suit after suit, arranged from blue to gray to black, hung on a long bar across the right wall. Perfectly starched shirts on the left. Racks of shoes at the ready.

  “This town must have some dress code,” Jesus said.

  “Sartorial splendor always gives the impression that you’re on your way to a better class of gathering than you’re at now,” Jimmy Ray said and selected a blue double-breasted pinstripe, a Brooks Brothers he’d bought in Miami a few years back. It was a real classic. Timeless and elegant—but not, however, on Jesus.

  Once dressed, the barefoot, tieless man looked a lot like a Mafia hit man on vacation.

  “Nearly there,” Jimmy Ray said and chose a red Japanese silk tie and matching square. Tied a perfect Windsor knot and arranged the square, just so, in the breast pocket of the fine suit.

  “There you go,” he said. “What do you think?”

  Jesus stared at himself in the full-length mirror. He looked like someone else. Someone he knew, but he wasn’t sure who it could be. Made him feel like he was channel surfing though somebody else’s life.

  “How do you think I look?” he said, unsure.

  In the right light, the man could have been mistaken for a deranged Italian viscount who once held court at Café Du Monde and fed beignet to a parrot he called “Queenie”—but Jimmy Ray decided that, perhaps, this might not be the right thing to say. So he said, “You look like one of those real executive types, a real mover and shaker. Doctor, maybe.”

  The word doctor made Jesus’ hands shake. He hid them in the pockets of the suit coat. “Maybe, I just want to be Jesus,” he said. The words rumbled. He looked at Jimmy Ray with those Bible eyes.

  At that moment, Jimmy Ray swore he had never seen anybody trapped in so much crazy. Plenty of wild men from back in the day who were hipped up on “horse,” or booze, or both—shooting up right onstage—but nobody this crazy who was this calm, and this sober, at the same time. It was hard not to feel sorry for him. Jimmy Ray put his arm around the man’s shoulder and gently said, “Son, the shadow of the moon is not the moon.”

  Jesus looked at him, unblinking, “But the shadow is all we have.”

  Jimmy Ray had to smile, he couldn’t help himself.

  “Are you sure you’re not a Buddhist?” he said. “I think you’re holding out on me.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jesus said, “but there’s a lot of things I’m not too clear on these days.”

  So now, the two, resplendent in nearly matching double-breasted pin-striped suits, are in the kitchen making Christmas dinner. Aprons are tied around their bony waists. Jesus is wearing Jimmy Ray’s velvet bedroom slippers. Jimmy Ray is in his spit-polished black dress shoes.

  Dagmar has been ordered to put her feet up. She is sitting on the couch, asleep, but won’t admit it. Every now and then a noise from the kitchen—a laugh, a hoot, the singing of a carol—wakes her and she says, “I’m not asleep.” Then falls back into a dream. On the television, Jimmy Stewart is having a wonderful life, more or less. Mostly less.

  In the kitchen, however, the two men are chopping onions, country ham, and celery for the stuffing. They work together as if they do this every year. Jimmy Ray lights the gas oven. The jets whoosh.

  “It’s nice to have company,” he tells Jesus. “Not too many folk around anymore.”

  In Jimmy Ray’s neighborhood, blocks of abandoned houses are green with mildew and crumbling back into the sand. They serve as roosts for turkey vultures and the occasional eagle. Herons make nests in the phone lines.

  As the men work, Jimmy Ray notices that Jesus has a way with knives. He is precise and quick. The blade moves so easily in his hand, he could be a chef. “Those are nice knives, aren’t they?” Jimmy Ray says. “Dagmar got me a set like they have at The Café. They’re a little dull, though. I got to make some time to sharpen them.”

  Jesus looks closely at the knife. It’s professional grade. The forged steel blade is large. Sharp or dull, it could do real damage. It reminds him of something. The way it feels in his hand. The weight of it. The power. He gets this odd look on his face, one that Jimmy Ray doesn’t trust.

  “I think you should know one important fact about me,” Jimmy Ray says. “I’m a cautious little Buddhist.” Then he lifts up his white apron, his Luger is stuffed in the waistband of his pants. “Just thought you should know.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Just so we understand each other,” Jimmy Ray says. “Only seems fair.” And then he goes back to the chore at hand, tears the cornbread into pieces, adds the vegetables, cracks two eggs, and mixes the stuffing with his hands. In all his years playing the clubs, he’s learned that the best way to deal with any kind of crazy is not to deal with it too much. Don’t push. Just be clear.

  “This is going to be one fine meal,” he says.

  Jesus, still holding the knife, is watching Jimmy Ray work. Thinking about the gun. Wondering just how quick the old man is.

  Jimmy Ray sees the question on Jesus’ face. “I’m not going to have to shoot you now, am I?” he asks.

  Jesus shakes his head slowly. “Not now, no.”

  “That’s good because those sweet potatoes are not going to peel themselves.”

  Jesus picks up a sweet potato and peels its tough fibrous skin in one long swirl. Then picks up another. And another. His command of the blade is masterful. Jimmy Ray hums “Amazing Grace.”

  Nearby, on the counter, collard greens wilt. The frozen pecan pie sweats.

  After a while Jesus says, “I think you should know that I don’t remember.”

  Jimmy Ray turns up the heat on the pot of stock that he hopes will reduce down into mighty fine gravy. Flames lick the sides of
pot.

  “Remember what?”

  He turns to see Jesus holding the knife in his hand as if it were a torch. There’s no menace in his eyes, just darkness. “Anything,” Jesus says. “Before I wound up in Whale Harbor, I don’t remember anything at all.”

  This is not good, and Jimmy Ray knows it. The Luger feels heavy against his ribs. He doesn’t want to have to use it. He knows that if he has to fire at this range, he won’t miss. He’s seen what a Luger can do at close range. Back in 1950, the police escorted him out of New Orleans for shooting a man in self-defense. The force of the shot kicked the man into a wall, and nearly through it. Blew a whole right through the body. The look of surprise on the man’s face—Jimmy Ray still remembers it. Remembers it now. Remembers the way the heart kept pumping until the blood was nearly all gone.

  Living the blues is a lot harder than singing them, he thinks. The stock, unstirred and unnoticed, begins to boil. Then overflows. Gas flames flicker and spit. Jimmy Ray jumps. “Shoot,” he says.

  Jesus ducks.

  “No. No. I meant ‘shoot,’ the pot,” Jimmy Ray says and quickly lowers the flame. “Not shoot the Jesus.”

  It’s then that Dr. Ricardo Garcia remembers the moment right before he became Jesus. Remembers how peaceful the couple looked in the silk king-sized bed of the American Dream. Remembers how easy it was to drug their drinks at the restaurant and then later overtake them.

  In the end everyone welcomes death, he thinks, and smiles.

  “You okay?” Jimmy Ray asks. “You doing okay, son? I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Sure. I’m just fine,” Jesus says and hears Dr. Ricardo Garcia speaking. His voice, always cool and confident, reassures the old man. “Everything is just fine.”

  “That’s good. I’m glad,” Jimmy Ray says. Then he remembers, “Hey, you never did tell me what you think of the suit? Is it the real you?”

  Jesus looks into Jimmy Ray’s old man’s yellowed eyes, and can see death there, crouched and waiting. He smiles again and picks up the large stainless mixing bowl filled with stuffing and looks closely at his own image reflected in it—the long hair, the scraggly beard, the crown of thorns scars, the Brooks Brothers pin-striped suit with red silk square, matching tie, and crisp Egyptian cotton shirt with French cuffs.