Victory Over Japan (12 page)

Someone in the audience started throwing money. A handful of change hit the stage. Some dollar bills. A wad of paper. More change. A paper cup. I was yelling out more words. Anything I thought up. Now I wasn't even bothering with the music.
Anybody that wants to stop me has got another think coming, I sang. Diane doesn't stop for no man. No man calls my name. No man's got the drop on me. No one's got my number. About like that
.

I could see it all so clearly. I had missed my calling. I was a singer who had never gotten to sing. A singer who forgot to sing. I had been denied my destiny. I meant to stay up there all night and make up for lost time but a bouncer came up on the stage and dragged me off and delivered me to Sandor.

After that the heart went out of the evening. The bars were closing. The streets looking wet and deserted. We wandered back to the Quarter to see if we could recapture the night but the night was gone. The parrots were falling from the nets, someone had turned a pitcher of beer over on a table. It was dripping slowly down off the black leather edges. My mind kept going away. I kept thinking about fields of wheat I had seen once in Kansas. Fields of barley. Malt growing somewhere I had never visited. Rain falling. All of that to end up beer. A surly, embarrassing fat sort of drink.

We piled into a taxi and told the driver to take us home. It was some off-brand taxi company. The driver was a hard-looking black man without much to say. He didn't turn his head until we got to the hotel. Then Sandor pulled a wad of money out of his pocket to pay him and half of it fell on the floor and we had to pick it up. We were too drunk to tell the ones from the tens. Finally Sandor handed the driver a handful and we got out and went on up to our room.

***

It was Lanier who thought up the ménage à trois. I guess she didn't want me to feel left out. I was so depressed by then I'd have gone along with anything. We took off our clothes and got in bed and started trying to decide what to do. I couldn't find anything I really wanted to do. Finally I ended up with my mouth on Sandor's arm, sort of sucking on his arm. Sandor and Lanier kept kissing each other, stopping every now and then to try to kiss me or pat me here or there. “Stop it, Lanier,” I said finally. “I may be crazy but so far I'm not queer.”

“This isn't queer,” she said. “It's a ménage à trois. Everyone in Paris used to do this. I read about it in a book by Simone, what's her name. You're the one that always wants to be so free, Diane.”

I sighed. Sandor rubbed his hand across my head. I patted him on the back and tried to roll over to the unused part of the bed. I knew we should have gotten two rooms, I was thinking. But I can't sleep by myself in a hotel. I never sleep a wink.

“Come on, Diane,” Sandor said in his sweetest voice. “Let me make you feel good too. Come back over here by me.” I was going to do it but I heard a sound, like breathing underwater. I looked toward the door. The black man was standing in the door with a gun in his hand. He moved into the room and closed the door. He had a face like a shell. We were all very still. We had been waiting all our lives for this to happen. Now it was here.

“One of you get out of bed and collect the money for me,” he said. “Come on. I'm sick of all this shit. I'd just as soon shoot all three of you in the face as look at you. Come on. Come on. And if you turn me in to the police I'll track you down and have your asses. So think it over before you file a report.”

Lanier got out of the bed. She was trying to tie the sheet around her but it was still attached at the bottom of the bed. She picked up her pants to put them on then thought better of that and started sort of skipping or hopping around the room getting our billfolds. She laid everything she could find on the untouched bed. Sandor and I were very still. I don't know what we were doing. “That's it,” the man said. “Now take the driver's licenses and credit cards out of the billfolds and the money and any jewelry you have. Come over here. Put them on the floor. About a foot from me. That's it. That's a good girl. You sure are a big girl to have such little tiny teats. That's it. Now then, go tie your buddies up. Tear off part of the sheet and tie their hands behind them. On the bed. Come on. Hurry up. I'm sick of all this shit. I'd just as soon kill all three of you. Save tying you up.”

“I'll tie them up as fast as I can,” Lanier said. “I used to be a Girl Scout. I know how to tie things.” I couldn't believe how cool she was being. Like she had forgotten she was naked. “We have some Escatrol,” she said. “It's a prescription drug. It's very hard to get. Would you like that too? It's in my pocketbook. Should I get that and put it by the money?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I'll take it. Put it there, pancake teats, then get on that bed. I'll do the tying.” He was wearing a dark jacket with a white shirt. That's all I remember. Except his face, like an oyster shell. There was a design on the shirt, calligraphy. In black and red. Lanier walked right over to him and laid the stuff on the floor. I thought he would hit her with the gun but he let her go away. Then he tied her to the other bed and cut the phone wires and tied our hands together. I closed my eyes when he touched me. His hands were so cold. I will feel them until I die. He turned off all the lights and left the room.

Everything was very quiet when we got back to Momma's house the next afternoon. The beaches were deserted as far as I could see. Hardly a seagull was in sight. I went into the kitchen and started making chocolate milkshakes with some old moldy ice cream I found in the freezer. I made them so thick you had to eat them with a spoon. I ate half a pound of ice cream while I was getting them ready. I took one and gave it to Sandor. He was lying on the living room floor watching TV. I took one to Lanier. She was on the sleeping porch reading a magazine. I took mine and a bag of chocolate mint cookies and went into my mother's bedroom and lay down on the bed and started nibbling on the cookies. It was six o'clock. Before long it would be seven o'clock. Then it would be night. The old heron by the pier would snuggle down into his nest. All my life I had wondered where he put his feet. I pulled my knees up against my soft full stomach. I would never weigh 114 again as long as I lived. Nothing would change. Good girls would press their elegant rib cages against their beautiful rich athletic husbands. Passionate embraces would ensue. I would be lying on a bed drinking chocolate milkshakes. Eating cookies. Wishing Lanier hadn't given the Escatrol away.

LENNY Weiss had been sweeping sand for an hour. Was that any way to treat asthma? He stopped for a moment, leaning on his broom. He
looked out across the picnic tables to the cool brown river, the Little Falaya. How many small brown fish had his poles pulled from its waters? How many
times had he waded out and let the river take him, legs, thighs, everywhere?

It was his river. It was his beach. It was his beach house. It was his property. It was his No Trespassing sign and goddamn them they had been there again. Their footprints were everywhere. How could he be
expected to run the store and protect the beach house and keep people from stealing ties and belts and keep vandals off the beach and take care of
Mother and have money left to buy tanks for Israel? It was too much. It was just too goddamn much. Well, at least I'm not married to Crystal, he
consoled himself. No matter what else Manny got, he got Crystal along with it. It was fair. There was always justice in the end. Wasn't there?
Wasn't there?

Crystal was Lenny's sister-in-law. She was the only enemy he had in the world. She knew it and he knew it
and Manny knew it and her crazy son, King, knew it, and Mother knew it. It was not a secret. It was war. Like this summer house business. Who kept the
screens repaired? Who replaced the trash cans? Who got the calls from the sheriff? Who always came over,
all by himself
, and cleaned the
messes up? Lenny Weiss, Leonard Sidney Weiss, that's who.

He sneezed again. Perhaps it was the cape jasmine covered with
dusty blooms. Perhaps the oleander. He fished the vaporizer out of his pocket and sprayed his good nostril. He sprayed his bad nostril, wondering what
it would be like to have a good nose, a nose that worked, a nose that could be depended upon.

He replaced the vaporizer in his
pocket and went back to work on the sand. He swept the flagstones leading to the bridge over the lagoon. He swept the dance floor beside the pavilion.
He swept the playroom and under the canoes and picked up the empty bottles and potato chip bags.

Now all he had left was the
ladies' room. He hated to go in there. It seemed a place so sacrosanct, so holy with Mother's flowered suit hanging on its peg, so radiant
with her hand creme, her bathing cap, her comb. All his life Lenny had watched her disappear through that door, then reappear, shy and sweet in her
little suit, ready for the sun, ready for the river.

Well, someone had to clean it up. Manny wasn't coming to help. And Zale
had run off to Detroit and Witherspoon was dead, God rest her beautiful black soul. Lenny sighed and wiped his hands on his khaki shorts. Why should
today be different from any other day?

He squared his shoulders and went on into the ladies' dressing room. It wasn't
too bad. At least they hadn't written on the walls this time. He straightened up the dressers and the benches and picked up the beer cans and a
pair of red bikini underpants someone had dropped in the shower. He swept the trash into a pile, and picked it up with a dustpan.

He had just replaced the top on the last of the trash cans when Ernest appeared, walking down the path through the cypress trees, looking
sober and good-natured, looking like a man who knew what he was about. Ernest was the Weisses' poacher. The Weisses let Ernest poach and in return
Ernest guarded the beach from trespassers.

Ernest was especially zealous about tubers coming down the Little Falaya from Red Rock.
He would lie in wait for them by the lagoon, then storm down out of the catalpa trees, waving his hands in the air, shouting, “ALLIGATORS,
ALLIGATORS, ALLIGATORS! NO TRESPASSING. PRIVATE PROPERTY! KEEP OFF! KEEP OFF!”

“So they got you again,” Ernest
said. “I'll be damned. I'll just be damned.”

“Where were you? I thought you were guarding the
place.”

“I was gone to Boutee to a funeral. I can't be everywhere at once. Well, it's the best beach on the
river. That last flood really left some sand.”

“What will we do?” Lenny said. “That's three times
since March. It upsets Mother. She wants it stopped.”

“Who told her? You ought to keep her out of it.”

“The sheriff called. They hit the Arnolds too, and the Savoies. It looks like a gang this time. Who's been here? Who's
been around that could have seen them?”

“Your sister-in-law and some of her buddies were here. They made a fire, right
out on the beach. In the middle of the beach. You can still see the ashes. Your mother isn't going to like that one bit.”

“Did they stay the night?”

“They were on the beach with no clothes on. So I left. I stay clear
when she comes over. I don't want nothing to do with that.”

“I'm sorry,” Lenny said. “I
apologize for that.”

“Not your fault. It's nothing to me. It's none of you, Mr. Lenny. I know it's
none of you.”

“The vandals have been so bad this year. It's because they closed the public beaches. That's
been bad for everybody.”

“Had to. The water's poisoned. Well, it's poisoned everywhere. Price you pay for
civilization I suppose. Always a price to pay.”

“Did anyone spend the night?”

“Her boy
did. The one they call the King. He stayed. He's still here. He lives here now.”

“King is here? In Livingston? In
the house?”

“He's right up there living in the house. Him and some girl he's with. Some Yankee girl.”

“Excuse me,” Lenny said. He laid his broom against a cypress tree. He wiped his hand across his brow. He got out his
vaporizer and sprayed his nose. “Excuse me, Ernest. I really have to go and see about this. Watch the beach a minute, will you?” Without
waiting for an answer he strode up the hill to the house. Beneath his feet the thick roots of the trees made a pattern in the washed-out ground. Above
his head a jay rattled the Cottonwood leaves. In the distance a motorboat tore down the river.

“It was different when your
black woman was alive,” Ernest called after him. “It was different then. Everything was different then.”

The
house was at the top of the path, a sprawling dust-covered antique of a house. On top was a widow's walk, the kind they build in New England for
sailors' wives to watch the sea. Idleweiss, the Weiss's called the old house. Lenny's uncle had taken it for a bad debt thirty years
before. The Weisses could not remember a time when it belonged to someone else. It was their summer house. It gave them an added dimension, a sort of
moss-covered dusty aristocracy. “This is our beach,” the little Weiss children loved to call out to people who came in boats. “You
can't stop here. This is a private beach. This is private property.”

Paint was chipping off the sides, palings missing
from the porch railings, the inside smelled like an old closet, but Lenny loved it. When he opened the front door he expected Witherspoon to be calling
out to him from the kitchen, offering him cream puffs or meringue tarts, asking about his fishing, praising his little fish, running her moist black
hand across his shoulders, sticking his vaporizer up his little nose.

Witherspoon had lived in the attic of the house, standing
guard over its treasures, spreading its floors with layers of wax, sweeping the paths to the beach, keeping the beachfront spotless. Not a leaf that
fell, not a twig blown in by rain, not a carton washed up on the shore had escaped her eyes until the day she died, fallen dead on the path to the
bridge, with her head on the steps and her feet curled up beside a cypress root. Some boys had found the body the next morning, the broom still in her
hand, the straw hat Manny and Crystal brought back from Little Dix Bay tied firmly under her chin. Witherspoon might have worn the hat, Lenny decided.
But she had seen through Crystal. She had seen through Crystal from the start.