Mislaid (16 page)

“I was thinking to buy a motel in Yorktown and get a boat slip up there,” Lomax said. “But shit, it all sounds like work. Even with no guests and no vacancies, you still got to keep the books. What the shit kind of a retirement is that? And Flea and Poodle, when I tell them they got shifts on reception, they’re going to lynch my ass.”

“Stop right there, my friend,” the Seal said, holding up his hand.

The Seal gathered his thoughts in silence, then unexpectedly, lyrically, described a house he’d seen on the Eastern Shore. It sat in meadows spiked with volunteer pines and surrounded by serious
forest, a big old wooden mansion with porches on every side and a widow’s walk around the roof lantern. From the widow’s walk there was a view across the barrier island to the ocean. There was a boat ramp and a dock on the creek. An earthly paradise. And it belonged to the state for back taxes. Nobody wanted it because you couldn’t develop it. It had an endangered species.

“Won’t that get hairy?” Lomax asked. “Walking into the state and telling them I want to buy a wildlife refuge for cash?”

“Delmarva fox squirrel, dude.”

“Oh, shit,” Lomax said. “Oh, shit!” In retirement they both were consistently kind of wasted and their dialogues were often as cryptic as their thoughts, but Lomax knew exactly what the Seal was trying to say.

When he brought the subject up to his father, he was initially met with raised eyebrows. However, Lomax’s gift was an undeniable godsend for the Virginia Squirrel Conservation Association, established many years before and, by dint of his father’s hard work and dedication, now boasting twenty members, only nine of whom were over seventy-five. The association was happy to accept a substantial windfall in the form of a dedicated capital gift from an anonymous donor. It was a tax-exempt charity, and donations to date had totaled $148. Purchase of a rodent reserve of international importance would catapult it from irrelevance to significant standing in the conservation world. Lomax’s father shook his hand with real appreciation, pumping it up and down. It seemed to Lomax a benevolent fate had intervened to launder his income in a way he never anticipated. As he left his parents’ house he dropped to his knees, crossed himself, and thanked the Great Spirit.

The house on the Eastern Shore had originally been named Kenilworth, but the new sign said
KEEP OUT.
Lomax called it Satori. It was posted
NO HUNTING NO TRESPASSING
all the way around
its vast perimeter. Except for the big clearing and some areas of open water, it was second-growth wilderness, full of old trees. Lomax and the Seal took up running around. Literally: running around. They would drop acid and race around the clearing in circles like dogs rocketing, and then top it off by diving from the little sandbank at the edge of the old bowling green and rolling over the soft turf like pill bugs, tumbling blissful and invulnerable. With time the Seal became softer and rounder from rolling, Lomax leaner and harder from running. Huge skies of seaborne cloud turned pink in the light of sunset, and swallows and seagulls met and turned away from each other in the air. Thunderstorms brought rains like an Indian monsoon, wet and fast as invisible buckets slicing through the air and sand on their way straight down to China. Twice a week they rubbed filet mignon with garlic and barbecued it. Fridays they alternated crab feast, lobster, and scallops.

Flea took up gardening, hoping to add vegetables to their diet. She didn’t get very far. On her knees in the sand, she planted radishes she thought would sprout in three days and be ready to eat in two weeks. A typical country girl, raised between the TV and the car. Agriculture to her was clouds of pesticide raining down on corn. She knew traditional uses for many wild plants—as toys. Which seeds would fly farthest, how best to step on puffballs, how to make a daisy chain.

Meg’s first visit, she refused to bring Karen, not yet having the lay of the land. She left her in the care of Dee and Cha Cha. It was a smart choice. For whatever reason, the first floor of the house was filled with hay to a depth of six inches. Flea wanted her to stay through the full moon to raise the Wiccan cone of power (she was getting an education of sorts through courses in Virginia
Beach), and the Seal wanted her to try his cocaine, which she did. “What is this shit?” she said, looking up with burning eyes. “This is crank.”

“It’s the finest coke on the East Coast,” the Seal insisted.

“Listen to me,” she said. “I know you’re experienced and all, but I used to run behind international faggotry, and I know cocaine when I taste it. This doesn’t even feel like cocaine. Yecch!” She clenched her teeth and shuddered.

“It’s the stuff we been selling,” Lomax said. “Are you telling me they been shitting me?”

“I’m not a chemist,” she said. “But seriously, if you were picking somebody to trust, at random, would you pick a drug dealer?”

“We’re all drug dealers here,” the Seal said.

“Are you wearing a really weird-looking shirt?” Meg asked him.

“It’s my sweatshirt I always wear.”

“Oh shit. I think it’s PCP. Honest to God. Fucking angel dust, man. I can’t believe it. You guys are the worst drug dealers in the whole godforsaken world!” She stood up and sat quickly back down. “Fuck!” she added.

“And we had them all paying cocaine prices,” Lomax said. “Aw, man. We were dicking people over right and left. Is that the kind of person I want to be?”

“Those assholes played us like a violin,” the Seal said. “You can bet if we’d lost one gram, they would have charged us for cocaine. And it was hard work! I mean, it was fun running up the bay in my boat, but it was all night, like swing shifts. For a white trash drug I’m embarrassed to have anything to do with. Shit!”

“I’m worse than you are,” Lomax said. “I went into retail on that shit. But nobody said a word! Doesn’t anybody know what cocaine is anymore? Not me, apparently.”

“People don’t fuck with drug dealers,” the Seal said. “But we should have made friends with a chemist.”

“So what’s in that acid Flea says you take all the time?” Meg asked. “Agent Orange?”

“Something jittery for sure. It gets us running around like rabbits.”

“That’s it,” Meg said. “I’m going back to drinking wine.”

“I wasn’t going to retire yet, but I’m losing all my ideals right here, right now,” the Seal said. “I mean it. I’m going to give up narcotics and go to work as a mercenary in Sri Lanka.”

“Sure you are,” Lomax said. “And what about my squirrels? Who’s going to defend my squirrels when you’re out there blowing away Tamil tigers?”

“The squirrels need you, man,” Meg said. “You got to stay. Give me a hit of that wine.” She glugged it and passed the bottle back to Lomax.

“Why don’t we deal booze?” Lomax said. “Like in Prohibition.”

“Are you nuts?” the Seal said. “Going up against a state monopoly! You want the ATF coming down on us? If you’re going to do a crime, you got to do something illegal, so you’re not competing directly with the government. That would be like if I started my own army instead of hiring on in Sri Lanka. Or smuggling cigarettes. That’s not little piss-ant drug dealer shit. For that, you need the Mafia.”

There was a brief silence, broken by the sound of Flea struggling with a thick brownie batter in the kitchen.

“You know what’s fun?” Meg said, leaning forward suddenly. “Tennis. You have any idea what a high that is, when you stroke the ball hard right into a corner? It’s total power and control.”

They turned to face her. “Tennis,” the Seal said. “I mean, popping gooks is a high, too, but I wouldn’t want to do it every day.”

“Tennis never gets boring,” Meg said. “It puts you in a trance. That’s what we should do! Play tennis!”

Lomax blushed, warming to her vision and spontaneously admitting its profound truth. He said, “You know, a tennis court would fit perfect on the old bowling green, and it wouldn’t bug the squirrels none. I like sports. I went duckpin bowling once. Sports would be a nice change from falling down. Flea!”

She padded through the swinging doors, anklets jingling, licking the spatula. “Break out the champagne!” Lomax called out. “We got a new action plan. We’re giving up drugs for tennis!”

“Why would you do that?”

“Don’t ask me. I am higher than a mountain.”

Shortly after that, there was a huge cocaine bust with hundreds of arrests all over the papers, but it didn’t seem to affect anybody they knew. It struck Lomax how funny it would be if he had been transporting angel dust from some lab in Floyd County the whole time, “laundering” it, so to speak, in the Atlantic. Then he realized that he’d never seen it in inner tubes on the shore. Just being unpacked from a flimsy bass boat in Poquoson. And he realized there was a lot he didn’t know. He shook his head and returned to his belated reading of
Eastern Chipmunks: Secrets of Their Solitary Lives
.

Contractors experienced in the building of tennis courts were rare on the Eastern Shore in those days. But the Seal had built entire landing strips. Meg declared the bowling green off-limits, so he repurposed a parking lot that had been the kitchen garden. From then on, Meg regularly brought along Karen and Temple. (Cha Cha boarded with the Moodys, as dogs were not allowed in the squirrel sanctuary.)

The tennis-playing Temple acquired a retro look that became
his uniform: a white cable-knit tennis sweater with a red-and-blue V-neck. When Karen stood next to him, leaning against the sweater with her arms around his torso, she didn’t look white at all. Compared to that sweater, nothing was white. Dee was a master of laundry chemistry. On sunny days, the sweater would hurt your eyes.

Meg began the day’s tennis lesson. The two children took their positions at opposite corners of the court. Temple’s windup was dramatic. What happened next made them all groan. The ball didn’t rise very high, and in a midswing attempt to avoid bonking his racket into his left knee, Temple threw his weight to the right, disregarding his right foot, which turned over. He sat down on the court, holding his ankle in disbelief.

“Smooth move, Arthur Ashe,” Meg said.

“I think I sprained my ankle,” Temple said.

“You need an ice pack,” Meg said. She headed for the house.

“Flea learned a shamanistic technique that would heal that ankle immediately,” Lomax remarked from his Adirondack chair. “She’s used it on me many times.”

“I want to see her do it,” Karen said.

“You know what? I feel all right,” Temple said. “I might try to hop on over to the house.”

“No, stay here so Flea can do shamanistic healing!” Karen said.

“Then at least be my pillow,” Temple said. Karen complied, sitting down cross-legged on the concrete. He arranged his head on her lap and said, “That’s better.” Meg returned with Flea and a dish towel full of ice cubes.

Temple was a little afraid of Flea. It was not difficult for him to let Meg palpate his ankle through his shoe. But when Flea took her place, squatting barefoot before him in her long skirt, and told him to relax so she could summon his totem animal, his
thoughts were distilled to one rhythmic litany: No, not now, do
not
get an erection. She untied his shoelace. “No, please no,” he begged her and himself. He wiggled his foot in self-defense, trying not to kick her. “Please no, Flea. Please.”

“Trust him,” Karen said. “You don’t want to smell his feet.” Flea lowered her hands and backed away, and Temple exhaled.

He felt his body lighten and withdraw from the dangers that surrounded it. He stretched out his arms and felt stillness and birdsong. Beyond the edge of the tennis court was the lawn, and beyond the lawn was the meadow, and beyond the meadow stretched the forest where you could hear the huge crested woodpeckers hard at work building nests for the squirrels. Beyond them lay the back bay, the cities, the oceans, the continents. The earth, endless and replete. The sun, straight up, a blinding hole leading to an immense void.

Temple stared at it unflinching and had an insight that stuck in his mind forever after. Behold the Sheltering Sky, he thought. I was understanding it wrong. It’s not a shelter because it protects you. It’s a way out. A sanctuary, a place you can go when things get out of control. Say for example you cripple yourself hitting a tennis ball and there’s one girl’s sweaty crotch cradling your head and another girl’s perfumed hair tickling your legs and nothing in between them but your dick and nobody watching but the one girl’s mom and the other girl’s boyfriend: There’s no need to run away. You can ascend to the region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. The shelter that received the risen Christ and Port in
The Sheltering Sky,
that comforted the mortally wounded Prince Andrei and the young W. E. B. Du Bois. Now I know.

Temple closed his eyes and his vision took on a very definite shape. He saw his winged soul appear risen to Karen. She would never doubt his innocence. Even his crucifixion wouldn’t worry
her in the least. She was an angel, one of the birds of the air of the Sheltering Sky, born to lead him there. He would fly through space and time with his Shadow at his side, in front of him, behind him—it didn’t matter where she was, she would always be linked to him, always respond to him.

He woke up (teenage boys fall asleep with astonishing suddenness in the most unlikely situations) and saw her face above his, upside down. She was not thinking of herself, but of him, like Mary in a pietà. He felt a need to increase the distance, a sudden conviction that if there were more space between them, something worth having might grow.

That night he crept to her bedside and said, “Shadow. Shadow!”

“What?”

“I’m in love with you!”

“Go to sleep!”

H
is third year at UVA, Byrdie declared as his major an exotic
conglomerate unknown in the history of The University or any other. He asked for an extra year to finish because he needed engineering credits. He saw his decision as the right and proper thing to do. It was planning that would save the world, not commerce. Economic growth driven by investment would exhaust Earth’s resources in a matter of years.

His theories were strongly influenced by the Kipling novel
Captains Courageous,
which he had found on a shelf at Lee’s parents’ house. A spoiled boy, heir to a railroad empire, learns the value of technological progress on a sailboat pursuing shoals of cod around the North Atlantic. Byrdie got to thinking: With today’s technology, the fishermen in the book could have hunted the cod to extinction. Cod now would be fabled creatures like the great auk. It was going to take clear-eyed young visionaries such as himself, powered by hereditary fortunes and thus immune to the forces of greed and speed, to pioneer the new antitechnology technologies that would restore helplessness and ineptitude to their rightful place as Tools for Conviviality (the Ivan Illich
book had been Meg’s). For instance, a return to narrow, bumpy city streets with trolley tracks and bike lanes instead of parking would send quality of life through the roof. The elderly and handicapped could ride in the bike lanes on golf carts. Byrdie called his imaginary planning bureau “R&D,” for Regression and Deceleration or maybe Density. He had already drafted a scheme to eliminate the west end of Richmond entirely, integrating it with the desolate north side of downtown and doubling the density to achieve quality of life squared, and gotten an A-plus.

Lee’s fantasies of feudal power had always been confined to strict geographical limits. On further analysis he found them even more appealingly modest and humble. Had any Fleming ever aspired to anything more than to create a pleasing environment for himself and his friends? Had Flemings interfered in the lives of others since being knocked off their high horse at the close of the 1860s and/or 1960s? He thought Byrdie might be a clinical case. After all, the mother had been insane.

He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet. Then, pretending to hesitate to break the bad news, he pointed out that the hereditary fortune was a bit of a question mark. Lee was, he said, broke. His salary was a drop in the bucket. He didn’t own the house he lived in. His parents were spending his inheritance right and left on increasingly expensive vacations, tootling around Norwegian fjords on first-class ferryboats and dabbling in the Himalayas. Exclusive inside knowledge of the world financial system, acquired from Lyndon LaRouche for $5,000 a year, had not stopped them from buying a town house in Georgetown right before the stock market crash. He was starting to wonder whether they hadn’t mortgaged everything they owned. Byrdie might be well advised to pursue a career that involved such niceties as an employer.

The irony was not lost on Byrdie. He listened to Lee’s complaints and said he would take them under advisement.

Dee had feared the best she could afford for Temple was community college, but when he began getting letters from historically white colleges all over the South, soliciting his application and offering scholarships on the basis of his PSATs, her mind was made up. She said, “Temple is going to The University. If it was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, it’s good enough for my son.”

Self-confident Temple dashed off his essay in an afternoon. Karen’s application caused her weeks of grief. After abandoning several memoir-like drafts about various aspects of her life, which seemed more incoherent the deeper she got into it, she wrote about her ambitions. When the past is hard to explain, it’s best to concentrate on the future. She wrote that she wanted to work hard and get good grades and pick an interesting major.

Charlottesville being far away, the admissions office had a local alumnus interview the applicants. He wasn’t a professional, just a public-spirited businessman prepared to meet the children of country-club acquaintances and recommend their admission. He volunteered a Saturday afternoon and borrowed the librarian’s office adjoining the high school media center.

Karen felt insecure, but it had little to do with her qualifications to attend college. It was puberty. Just turned fifteen, she had attained maximum unfamiliarity with her own body. She always expected to grow up boyish like Meg, but she took after Lee’s mother instead: an eye-popping hourglass in miniature, but nervous about it, with skinny legs and bitten nails.

For the interview, she wore a blue double-knit suit, bought at a thrift shop in an ancient gas station, that had been hand-sewn before her birth for an even smaller woman. She mumbled, feeling
shy, and left with tears in her eyes. The interviewer looked down at his form and tried to formulate a way of calling her childlike, yet trashy. He regarded the box checked “black” as evidence of functional illiteracy. Her grades did not impress him. This, he said to himself, is a corn-fed heifer who lets teachers feel her up.

Through the glass window of the librarian’s office he watched her shuffle away in her short, tight suit and strappy sandals with three-inch heels (hand-me-downs from Janice), unwittingly waggling her ass—the only black thing about her, in his opinion. He would have compared her to the one secretary in
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,
but given her size, mood, and clothing, he kept thinking of
Taxi Driver
. He watched her collapse sobbing into the arms of a gangly black boy in a blindingly white old-fashioned tennis sweater. He said something that made her smile. She responded with something that made him nod. Their brief conversation gave the strange but distinct appearance, to someone who couldn’t hear it, of being charming, witty, and enticingly mysterious. The girl uttered a long sentence, tears on her eyelashes, and the boy looked at the ceiling for a moment before replying with another long sentence that made the girl cock her head quizzically, and so on. The two seemed oblivious to the prep school boys and girls slumped nervously in upholstered chairs. Then the boy looked at his watch. The next interview slot was his.

The interviewer forgot to make any notes about Karen at all. Because Temple blew him away. After he met Temple, he called the dean of admissions and gave him a heads-up. Modest, handsome, well-spoken, sharp as a tack. Temple in his essay had done his best to be funny, sprinkling it with quotations from Montaigne since French was the subject he enjoyed most. As a Joyce and Beckett maniac, he didn’t see himself as having a choice. The interviewer spoke a bit of French to see what would happen and
Temple replied, his grammar convoluted and his accent proving beyond a doubt that he could also spell, that whether his ultimate posting was in Francophone Africa, which of course fascinated him, or the Soviet Union, as he dared to hope, a command of the French language would be indispensable to his activities as a diplomat, a career he felt The University could help him work toward. The interviewer felt a pang of envy.

The admissions office made Dee drive him to Charlottesville to interview for a merit scholarship. Temple left them bewildered and excited. What egg did he hatch from? Since when do things like that crawl out of the woods? They called the high school to make the principal nominate him, and handed him a four-year free ride. And not because he was underprivileged, but because they considered him one of their best applicants that year. The chief admissions officer described him to the committee as a high-potential whom they could not afford to lose. Financial aid, he could get anywhere. They would lose a bidding war with the Ivies. They needed a prestigious scholarship as bait.

As for his classmate, well, they’d be fools to admit a kid black as the ace of spades without admitting his girlfriend. There were maybe two hundred black girls enrolled at The University. One was absurdly fat and in a wheelchair, and another was a hair-trigger feminist with a habit of standing up in lectures and yelling, not to mention the two girls from prominent families in DC, both majoring in prelaw—whatever that was—who were so extremely attractive that it hurt the dean of admissions to look at them. These were the black girls one noticed. It was safe to assume they would be of no assistance to Temple. The dean recalled the one Black Student Alliance party he had attended as a bleak affair. It was hard to say what had depressed him more: the studied footwork of the couples on the dance floor, or the heartrending petty bourgeois piteousness of cucumber sandwiches passed around by
accounting majors whose overly colorful bow ties had been expressly chosen to keep them from looking like waiters. Lonely, Temple might become a danger to himself and white women. The light-skinned girlfriend was a ready-made shock absorber and, after all, a legitimate applicant in her own right.

They let her in and gave her a grant. As the dean said, she could have qualified for food aid in Biafra. She was about the poorest applicant they’d ever seen.

To say Temple was ecstatic would be an understatement. He was lit from within. He had always suspected he had potential. Now he had official confirmation. The State Department beckoned. All he had to do was ace a triple major in international relations, Slavic languages, and government while slaking his thirst for math, science, literature, history, various upscale PE offerings such as rock climbing and squash, etc.

Meg, too, was overjoyed. Karen was fifteen and three-quarters, awfully young to go to college, but she had a commonsensical, matter-of-fact way of approaching things. You couldn’t call it maturity. It was passivity, that was all. Who knew what she really wanted from life. She seemed to regard Temple as her hereditary betrothed, which somehow got her off the hook for getting sexually involved with him. Meg and Dee agreed on that score: Temple and Karen were like Hansel and Gretel. They worried that Karen, surrounded by college boys who thought she was white, would ditch Temple and break his heart.

With UVA in the bag, Temple felt he had time to catch up on his black studies. He enjoyed
Soul on Ice
and
The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Then Meg bought him
Coming of Age in Missis-sippi
. It was like giving a Jewish kid a coffee-table book about Auschwitz. Before then nothing had occurred to shake Temple’s belief in universal ethical values. Black men overcame (an intransitive verb), and that was that. Now he wondered if black people
might not be owed a hearty collective thank-you, perhaps in the form of trillions of dollars.

His cogitations culminated, late in his senior year, in an ill-advised one-man show adapted from Ellison’s
Invisible Man,
to be performed onstage at the shuttered black high school where he had attended first through seventh grades. (The new high school’s auditorium was also the gym, so it was a bit cavernous for the arts.) The set was not ready until dress rehearsal. The many lightbulbs onstage in the final scene blew an irreplaceable antique fuse, necessitating the postponement and ultimately the cancellation of a one-act festival that had cost the senior English teacher an awful lot of work.

Ike Moody grumbled silently that if Temple were a little smarter he would notice not only that his people were victims of prejudice, but that his family had been run off their property and was living in a housing project. But of course a future diplomat thinks in world-historical terms, unfamiliar with basic post-Marxian concepts . . . debt peonage, land reform, grumble, novels that leave him innocent as a newborn baby, grumble, grumble . . . Not being a big reader or a particularly determined steward of pieces of paper, Ike didn’t know his creek bank had its origins in Reconstruction land grants that totaled nearly four hundred acres. Nor did he know he had held on for an unusually long time.

After World War II—in the years of the “Great Migration,” when black people came out en masse as cold-loving proletarians—many Virginia counties had become dotted with vast and beautiful army, navy, air force, and CIA bases. That is, certain people’s land was taken in great swathes by eminent domain for national security, and where black people once hunted, fished, and farmed, servicemen now dwelt in high-ceilinged brick mansions on the water, watching pleasure boats come and go. Whenever the US
Congress leaned on the services to stop being dogs in the manger about such valuable real estate, they would—just an example here!—sell part to developers for a golf resort and the rest to retired officers. If you have to be bad, be so bad sympathetic hearers just shake their heads and give up.

Nobody suggested to Temple that his family had been cheated. Nobody wanted him growing up thinking people are bad or that the world is a bad place. That would have been Christianity or the Gnostic heresy, though they didn’t put it in those terms. They portrayed the world as in need of repair, not as populated by people you’d be insane not to hate. Resentment of collective ill-treatment of the race was fine, if it helped him fine-tune his sense of justice.

High school graduation was a triumph. Temple gave an earnest valedictory speech on independence cribbed from Thoreau. Whenever he raised his voice, he reminded the white parents of black activists they’d seen on TV, and they shrank back in their seats. It wasn’t what he was saying, which involved hopes for a more just world if people would sit down and do the math like Thoreau, but his wearing a suit and not being a preacher, yet speaking in public.

Karen as salutatorian reminisced about the years their class had spent together in a scholarly way. The parents were used to hearing more comprehensible things at commencement speeches such as “We sold out of Brunswick stew and our class spirit was psyched,” but many were pleased to find their children had been exposed to learning. They regarded Karen as an honorary white person and applauded extra loud.

Hearing the term “Jefferson scholar” as he took the scroll and shook the principal’s hand, Temple was hard put not to jump up
and down and squeak. He looked out and saw his mother gazing up with her hands pressed against her chest. His grandparents appeared transfigured by joy, blissful, liberated, expansive. His siblings were standing and whooping. His father’s place was empty, since he’d gone to the back of the gym to face the wall and dab at his eyes with a hankie. After Temple came the quarterback of the football team, with an athletic scholarship to George Mason, who got a lot more applause. But it was still the proudest moment of all their lives up until then. Dee was out of control all summer, high-fiving everyone. Trotskyite or not, Ike seemed to float around on invisible roller skates.