Bobby Shepard had breathed, turning reverently toward the car with the plastic-wrapped Beauty Rest mattress tied to it, the drink cups held before him like chalices and the plastic baggie moving in a slow squirm in the pocket above his heart. “Oh, thank you.”
He had thought the worst time would be when she first came to, there on the Beauty Rest covered with the floral sheets, and that if she was going to lose it completely it would be then and there at that first moment she opened her eyes and saw where she was. Not riding along in a vintage Thunderbird sipping at a large diet Sprite and ice and starting to feel so sleepy she couldn’t hold her head up, but lying on her back in a one-room fish cabin looking up at the ceiling where dirt-dauber wasps had put mud nests in every corner and along the sills of each window right up to the edge of where the wood ran out.
Bobby Shepard hadn’t even noticed the clumps of gray mud hardened into a material as tough as concrete until he was sitting in the plastic chair worked with a sea horse and crab design waiting for Celia Mae Adcock to rouse from her nap, and he would have sworn he had cleaned every surface of the cabin thoroughly. That’s what comes of just looking down at the floor and worrying about mopping it, he had thought to himself, instead of lifting up your eyes once in a while to see what might be above head-level. Too late to do anything about it now, he had concluded, but one thing was comfortingly for sure: Celia Mae Adcock wouldn’t get her feet dirty from walking on the floor, wood or linoleum part either. Bobby had scrubbed it to a state of sterility.
But he had been mistaken in his dread of the instant when the head cheerleader of Thomas Jefferson High would wake from her doze and realize the strangeness of where she was and undoubtedly start screaming and crying in stark terror, convinced that great harm was about to come to her from the man sitting in the light blue high-impact plastic chair with the sea creature motif worked all through its surface.
He had anticipated the look Celia Mae would have on her face. Horror, fear, unreason, all mixed up into a compound announcing her intention to break from the hold of the Beauty Rest and run in any direction. What might slow her down, he had asked himself, and delay her going so mad with fear she wouldn’t be able to listen to any calming words or assurances from him, but just simply flee for the outdoors like something caught in the woods, run into the walls like a trapped bird?
Bobby Shepard thought long, he thought hard, he turned on a battery-powered boom box programmed to play the same song over and over as Celia Mae lay in her stupor, lost in the drug-induced dreams of a head cheerleader of one of the most powerful high schools in the Golden Triangle of Texas. That musical offering, purring away in the tape drive, was Engelbert Humperdinck singing “Delilah” again and again directly into her ear.
Surely, Bobby felt, that hymn to the mystery and power of a woman able to conquer the strongest man in the Holy Bible would feed into Celia Mae’s unconscious mind, delivered as only Engelbert could bring it, and soak into her head a message of appreciation and awe for the kind of prime high school senior she was. It would show her, even while she was asleep against her will, the nature and depth of feeling the man who had captured her and brought her to the fish cabin was capable of. Whether she was interested in that fact or even cared to know it, she would have to hear it. Engelbert, chanting his tribute to her kind of woman over and over, would bring it on home.
When Celia Mae woke up, she woke up fast. Her eyes popped open, she sat up in bed, the brand new floral sheet cascading from off her uniformed chest to reveal the maroon and gold applique of megaphone, stars and bright letters, and she put both hands to her head and began to fluff her hair.
“What,” she said, looking not toward Bobby in his chair or about her at the one-room space of the fish cabin, but at the boom-box beside her pouring forth “Delilah,” “is that shit on the radio?”
“Engelbert,” Bobby said, swallowing hard and instinctively tensing to run toward the door should Celia Mae suddenly come flying at him with her fingernails held out, “Engelbert Humperdinck.”
“Is that a name?” Celia Mae said, still working at her hair with both hands to get out the tangles and the telltale signs of bed-head. “Or something you’d call a retard?”
“He’s a vocal stylist,” Bobby said, still poised on the edge of the sea horse and crab chair, enough so that the plastic was cutting into the underside of his thighs. It would leave deep red marks, he knew, and it was already putting his feet to sleep. “He does what they call romantic ballads. Or did. He might be dead by now, I don’t know.”
“Right,” Celia Mae said. “Sure. Where’s the eject?” She leaned over the edge of the bed and began punching buttons on the boom box, hiking up her cheerleading sweater as she turned to do so, high enough that Bobby could see a flash of bare skin. Something twisted a little somewhere deep in his belly, and he felt as though a meal he had really wanted when he was eating it was announcing now that it might be deciding to come back up.
“It’s got a mark on it,” he said. “It says E on top of the button.”
Now Celia Mae Adcock was examining the Engelbert Humperdinck cassette and reading the words on its label out loud. “Engelbert Sings Tom Jones: Smoky Bars and Dark Cabarets. Now who’s this one? Tom Jones. He must be using a consumed name.”
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