Thunderbird of thought up into the protection of steel-sided and be-roofed certitude.
He knew.
And what he had come to know was this: when a man fails in the endeavor to realize his joy and hope, it is because he loses himself in the need for the goal, in the end of the accomplishment, in the love object itself. Thus his forgetfulness, his ignoring of details, his slighting of process and way. Thus his doom; thus his loss.
And it was this reasoning that led Bobby Shepard to put to himself the painful questions, the second-guessing of every decision, the humbling of himself before the smallest and grossest of each material detail, the learning of and the discipline to a deep patience.
If he had had the space of weeks, days and hours commensurate to the depth of his devotion, Bobby would have spent a year deciding on the brand of mattress alone. He would have driven to Houston to Mattress Warehouse Discounters simply to compare colors and coil count. He would have flown to New Orleans to browse the aisles of Maison Blanc for designer sheets and pillow cases, to Dallas to shop for dust ruffles at Neiman Marcus.
But Bobby Shepard lived on a Pure Oil gauger’s salary in this world and in the Golden Triangle of Texas with its side streets and the driveways to many of its dwellings still made of oyster shells, its sidewalks unpaved except right downtown where no one ever went anymore anyway, and its atmosphere a rich brew of congeners, carcinogens, humidity, and high levels of ozone. The air much of the time looked faintly blue. It smelled tartly addictive. In the summer, a rain shower came each day for thirty minutes, beginning precisely at two o’clock in the afternoon, except during hurricane season when all schedules became irregular and nothing could be counted on.
Steam would rise for an hour from the pavement of the streets and all flat surfaces and roof tops, after each shower had ended, and to a person caught outside during the rain, the water felt as warm as a hot bath, and did not refresh.
Therefore, Bobby Shepard shopped at the Wal-Mart on Oleander Boulevard in Port Arthur for all that was needful to prepare the last remaining fish cabin at Angler’s Paradise at Smith’s Point for its true and fit purpose. The choice of name-brand products there was wide and varied, and it was from this stock he chose that which would be visible to a consumer. The Beauty Rest Magic Coil. The floral sheets with matching pillow case. The ruffled window dressings. The stressed-polyethylene patio chair, collapsible and imprinted with representations of hermit crabs and tiny sea horses. The case of Classic Coke in small bottles. The canned ham from Denmark. The four-pack of herbal-flavored Pringle’s chips. The quart jar of fat-free salad dressing. The box of floral-print Kleenex tissue.
It was only with the products not evident to the eye that Bobby stinted. And these he purchased not solely with a view toward economy. The cleaning materials, the insecticides, the room deodorizers, the oils and polishes, all these Bobby subjected to a nose wary and experienced in the manufacture of chemical vehicles, reagents and catalysts, and none was selected, regardless of cost, unless its appropriateness and potency was certified by sense of smell. If it did not speak of origin in a prime first-run barrel, the unguent, ointment, stripping agent, buffing compound, color enhancer or anti-coagulant was passed over, no matter how cheap its price or minor its mission in the transformation of the last standing structure at Smith’s Point into the Angler’s Paradise Fish-Cabin of Love.
Bobby shifted down to first gear to maneuver the Thunderbird around a water-filled hole in the road ahead, leaning forward to peer closely at its edge as he approached. One of the few times he had driven the one-lane shell road on a supply trip during the first week, he had let the right front wheel come too close to a similar hole and had dropped what felt like over a foot, bringing the car to a lurching stop. He was afraid he might have broken a tie rod, but hadn’t, luckily, and he had learned from the experience not to trust anything on Arden Hooks’s abandoned road that was covered with water.
Managing to miss this hole, he steered toward the center of the road and felt a twinge in his back just above his right kidney area as he removed his hand from the gear shift knob. No way he could sit in the bucket seat that it didn’t hurt him.
He had to give her credit, he thought to himself. Celia Mae Adcock had caught him with one hell of a kick, even though it was through the seat back itself and therefore cushioned from most of its force. It was the heavy-toed shoes she wore, he knew, and the fact that she exercised all the time to be able to cheerlead that accounted for the lasting effect he was suffering.
It was a good thing the drug, whatever the capsules were his wife kept in large amounts in the medicine cabinet, had begun phasing in so strongly when it did. Otherwise, the head cheerleader of Thomas Jefferson High might have kicked him in the small of his back so hard and so often on the trip from Port Arthur that his kidneys would’ve been permanently damaged. Might’ve ended up making water through a tube run up into his privates long before old age put him into a nursing home with all the attachments they hooked up to you in a place like that.
It was just the one good one she had got off, though, he thought, looking through the rearview mirror into the backseat where she lay snoring and pretty much covered up by a silver-colored ground cloth purchased from Wal-Mart. Before she got groggy enough from that medicine to doze on off and stop all that lamming and jerking and kicking around was when she had landed it. And curse? Lord God, where did a beautiful young girl like that dressed up in a maroon and gold cheerleading costume learn all those bad words she had called him?
Actually, Bobby considered, as he drove on at a steady, though slow, pace through the afternoon sun toward the fish camp, he did know all the nouns she had used. He had heard them delivered in his direction before lots of times. It was the modifiers, as Old Lady Chambliss had called them back in senior English class, that had puzzled him after she had gotten into the Thunderbird and begun to feel sleepy. Asshole, O.K. Cocksucker, yes. Shithead, naturally. But what was a rimjobbing such and such? What did it mean when somebody called you poncified?
She couldn’t have learned all those bad words off of TV. Bobby had cable, the extended sixty-four channel package, and he looked at each and every one of them, late night, that might show naked women with men or with other women and even once out of an open-access outlaw deal in Matamoros, Mexico, two women with a small donkey and a border collie. They never talked much, anyway, the people working on each other on those shows. They just tended to business, got the job done and never looked up.
Maybe that stuff she knew how to say Celia Mae Adcock had picked up from having to go to school with blacks or Chicanos or Hispanics or whatever they called themselves these days, and it was not really the language a squad of cheerleaders would use among themselves. Bobby hoped not. He hated to think of girls that looked the way they did, their hair all washed and shining and springy and their skin like brand new, freshly extruded latex just out of the machine, standing around in their costumes calling their boyfriends rimjobbing cool dudes and primo slitlappers.
It was a puzzle, and it was deeply bothering to Bobby, that kind of language, dropping from those lips, and he shook his head hard as though to clear it of such profanity as he drove the Thunderbird down the narrow track between the banks of palmetto and sawgrass and scrub pine.
Two more hard rights, he told himself, then that little swale and another half-mile, and I’ll be able to see the water and we’ll be there, me and her in the backseat in her cheerleader’s outfit with the applique megaphone and the four gold stars sewed on it to show she’s the head one. She’s Celia Mae Adcock. She stands in the middle of all of them and starts up every yell by clapping her hands together three times and saying all by herself while the rest of the cheerleaders wait, “O.K.,” clap clap, “Let’s go.”
Bobby stood breathing hard in the middle of the one-room cabin, winded after all he’d been doing: untying the mattress on the roof of the Thunderbird, getting it inside the building and its plastic covering
