So I knelt there at the delta, at the alpha and the omega,
at the cradle of the river and the seas.
And like a blessing come from heaven for something like a second
I was healed and my heart was at ease.
— Leonard Cohen, Light as the Breeze
Harvey Hill
When I called home from New Jersey to report I was back in the U.S., it was immediately clear how I had changed overseas. When the family matriarch answered the phone her voice sounded stuck on a slower RPM. I impatiently talked over her a couple times because she spoke so slowly. She resented it: “How-uh come you-uh speak-in’ so fa-yust?” It appeared I had lost a lot of my Southern accent.
It was confirmed when I strained to catch the nationality of the strange accent of the announcer calling my Atlanta flight and finally realized she wasn’t foreign, she was Southern. Takeoff scared me as always. I was convinced the flight from France depleted some finite pool of luck that would run out one day in flaming wreckage. I sweated out an endless aerial promenade in clouds above Atlanta before the plunge to earth.
In less than an hour I was airborne for the short hop home and survived that. I took a taxi to the Beaches. A sea wind was tossing palm trees shrouding the lane where I grew up two doors from the ocean. My soul expanded like a balloon. “Nice little beach house,” the cabby said. “Wish I could afford one.”
My mother and the aging matriarch came out to greet me. Our home seemed to have shrunk while I was gone. In an unusual public demonstration, my mother kissed my cheek. The cabby gave her an appreciative up-and-down as most men did, and me a thumbs-up. He thought she was my slightly older girlfriend. My mother had that effect on men. When she casually hefted my duffel bag in one hand and B-4 in the other, the cabby’s eyes widened. “Slinging mail bags in the Postal Annex agrees with you,” I said. “You’ve developed some muscle.”
“Pshaw! I always been strong.”
“Your granddaddy is inside,” the matriarch said. “We made the living room his bedroom. He cain’t climb stairs no more.”
The old man was sitting up in bed where my typewriter used to be in what suddenly was a tiny room. I had braced for what he would look like and felt a flood of relief. He looked like himself, tanned and grinning, showing off perfect false teeth. His triceps writhed with coiled muscle when he hitched around to shake hands. Only evidence of the missing leg was a dip in the bed sheet; not even diabetes and amputation diminished him.
“You got my old room upstairs,” he said. “Yore mama put yore typewriter and pipes and books up there.”
“What’s that I smell in the kitchen?”
“I fried a mess of shrimp earlier,” the matriarch said. “I know you like ’em cold, and they’re ready now.”
“I made tartar sauce like they did at Strickland’s,” my mother said. “And Mama baked biscuits for you.”
“Biscuits is breakfast food but I did it,” the matriarch said. “And you know how I hate to make biscuits anymore.”
“Git out of that hot ol’ uniform and let’s eat,” my mother said. “Your clothes is upstairs in Daddy’s room.” She eyed me with the calculating eye of a life-long calorie counter. “They’ll be loose on you now. Maybe tight in the shoulders.”
As I started for the stairs I noticed a framed painting above the old man’s head. A well-done portrait of a sad carnival clown. Not an imitation of Emmett Kelly; the makeup wasn’t sad, the clown was, behind his translucent happy makeup. I had spent an afternoon in the Louvre a couple of days ago, not easily impressed. But the portrait was arresting. “That’s new,” I said.
The old man was grinning like the Cheshire cat. “Glenda bought it to me in the hospital when they cut off my leg. Said it was how she felt.”
The matriarch put her hand on my arm. “She’s been coming out to visit a lot since you been gone. Said she must miss you most as bad as we do.”
Her mouth twisted; she did not approve feminine interest in me. She had warned me against designing women for as long as I could remember. I felt dizzy. Too many changes, too fast. The slow drawls, the shrinking house, the old man’s missing leg, biscuits at midday — and now Glenda.
“Guess you’re more like me than I thought,” the old man said. “Got one o’ them ‘come-back’ peckers they keep comin’ back for.”
The matriarch punched the old man on the arm. “Shut your foul mouth, you embarrassed him.” It was true.
He chuckled. “Wait till she gets out here this evenin’.”
“She said you had a date with her tonight.”The matriarch fixed me with her ice-blue eyes. “Was she makin’ that up?” I was suddenly sixteen again and she was protecting me from women’s wiles.
“I didn’t know she could get away,” I said.
Not really a lie but not the truth. A date? It was true our correspondence had become more intimate while I was in Europe. Equally true I sent a telegram from Paris American Express telling her when I’d be home. But she was married to a possessive asshole. My mother cocked an eye. “Oh, she’ll get away all right — for you!” She never shared her mother’s fear women would take advantage of me. “Expect her at seven. I’d put money on it.”
“No takers,” the old man said.
“Oh she’ll be here all right,” the matriarch grumbled.
And she was, driving up the lane in a new gray Mercury that looked big as a battleship in the narrow lane. The old man, out on the front stoop in his wheelchair, directed her to park in the neighbor’s yard. They were talking when I got to the front door. She planted a peck on his bald head. Then here she came in that rapid heel-clicking walk of hers, wearing a simple sleeveless lime-green shift with a nice V above her perky breasts. She walked right into me and wrapped her arms around me, tipping her head up to give me her laughing eyes.
“Welcome home, stranger.” I couldn’t seem to find my voice. She went up on tiptoes and whispered. “You better hug me back, you big lug. And if you don’t kiss me, your grandfather will!”
I had never hugged or kissed her in my life. Thought about it a lot, never had the nerve. Never had the nerve to kiss any woman for that matter. Paris and my amazing lover there changed me forever. Now it seemed this was the purpose of the change as her tongue invaded my mouth and found mine. The height difference was such it took a subjective eternity to realize the twin points of fire against my lower rib-cage were her nipples through the thin fabric of her frock. She released me suddenly and pulled back. I dropped my arms, thinking she’d been shocked by the bulge that swelled my pants. But she grabbed my hands tightly and stood looking at me with swollen lips and sleepy eyes.
“Ready for our date?” I gulped and nodded. She cleared her throat. “Can we take your car? I’m in no shape to drive!” Like I was. I led her to my Barracuda and handed her in, admiring the tidy way she tucked in her tidy body. When I drove away, she waved gaily.
“Your grandmother thinks I’m corrupting you.”
“I certainly hope so,” I said. “After that kiss.”
Her laughter was a happy silvery sound. I drove south, not really knowing where I was going. When I reached Beach Boulevard the choices were turn down onto the sand or west toward the city. Old beach-dwellers’ habits sent me west. I had surprised too many incautious lovers in cars while beach-walking, seen too many cars taken by the returning tide. Besides, sand rusted the undercarriage. She was turned to face me, knees drawn up fetchingly. She had kicked her pumps off. “We’re not going to make out on the beach?” She sounded disappointed.
“The tide,” I said. “Can’t risk being distracted down there.”
“Oh!” Her hand trailed gently up and down my leg. “Nice slacks. Are they European?”
“The slacks are PX. The shirt is German.”
“I don’t think I like bucket seats. I can’t get close enough.”
I reached behind the seats.“Before my brother went in the Navy — ah!” I brought out a thickly rolled beach towel and pushed it down between the seats.
“Trust your brother. Your folks told me all about his string of beach bunnies.” She swarmed across the towel to snuggle. I drove off the highway onto San Pablo Road and turned into an ancient sand logging road through scrub pine and cypress hammocks, nursing the car until I felt the sand was firm. I drove slowly out to the Intracoastal Waterway until we could see yachts passing. When I shut off the engine, she came into my lap. We kissed and held and whispered things we only hinted in letters. At some remove, I couldn’t believe the unattainable married beauty was in my arms whispering words I had only dreamed.
When I finally palmed her breasts the nipples almost burned my hands through her frock. She groaned. I thought I’d hurt her. I still was very young toward women. Did not recognize that primal sound of need in the confusing context of Glenda. She removed my hands and pulled back to her seat. For an eternal moment my eyes refused to convey an image to my brain, as if struck blind.
In that moment she reached behind, unzipped and shucked her frock onto the floorboards and came back into my arms stark naked. No panties, no bra. The inference almost more than the bare fact nearly made me ejaculate in my pants.
“Remember when you told me the Barracuda’s back seat folds down like a station wagon?” she said against my mouth.
I mumbled something that might have been yes.
“Show me,” she whispered.
By the time I had the seat down, the beach blanket under her hips on the uneven carpet, my shirt off and pants around my ankles, the sometimes-hated part of my brain that stood apart and kibitzed woke up. Reminded me my long-absent father told me when I was 18 to always get a room; car sex with your clothes bunched around you was for amateurs. Yet here I was in that very position with a woman I was hopelessly in love with.
Too late to think about a room. She opened to me and I went into her, and her bare heels dug into my rump, lifting her hips to tug me deeper while she writhed and sobbed under me.
Now my brain recorded the damn gas tank was half empty. Every thrust caused a hollow boink below the carpet. My brother had warned me. What kind of moron designs a car for fucking and puts the gas tank in such a stupid place? My brain short-circuited my cock. I softened slightly. I thrust deep to gain friction, but lack of friction was not the problem.
Then I realized her sobs had become actual tears. She was clinging to me like a limpet, crying as if her heart were broken. I stopped thrusting and held her. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I love you, goddammit!” First time she’d ever said it. Before I could say anything she sobbed into my shoulder like a hurt child. “I love you and I can’t come! I love you in me and I can’t come. Goddammit, what’s wrong with me!”
“Darling,” I said. First time for that too. “Darlin’, stop fretting. It’s okay.” My cock softened quickly. “We just got started. It’s okay.”
“I wanted you so bad,” she wailed. “Now I’ve messed it all up.”
“Hush now. Hush. Everything’s okay. Everything’s okay.” The big rear window was totally steamed over. I was slick with sweat. But I still felt her scalding tears against my neck. The only thing I could do was keep gentling her like a spooked horse. “You said you love me,” I said. “Do you realize you said it?”
She shifted under me. “Of course I love you, you idiot. But why didn’t you say it back?“Oh, shit, Glenda, I’ve been in love with you since the first day I saw you back when I was a copy boy.”
She sniffled. “Really? But you never…”
“I was too afraid.”
“Oh Ish, really?”
I raised her tear-wet face, a pale blur, and realized dusk was falling. “Really,” I said. “Glenda, I love you.”
“What are we gonna do, Ish? I mean…”
Before she could finish the thought, bright headlights flared against the steamed-over window. I heard a truck engine. “Oh god! It’s Marcus! He followed me!” She began to emit a low wailing terrified sound. But I could hear voices now, Cracker voices, above the truck engine.
–Somebody rippin’ him off a piece. –Sumbich blockin’ us getting’ to the houn’s.–Gonna lose that ‘possum, shore.–S’all right, let’s go take a look, maybe get a taste our own selves.–Hell, yeah!
My rage was instantaneous. I never remembered later how I got out of the car, pants around my ankles, my Colt from under the front seat braced on the tail-light housing.
Neither woods-runner had even opened a door. “Shut off your lights!” I sang out in my best MP voice. “Do it now.” I was peripherally aware of Glenda behind the steamed window, scuttling for her dress.
“Hey, nowww,” came the drawled response. “Ain’t no need…”
“Shut ’em off or I shoot ’em out. The next rounds are through the windshield.”
“We got shotguns in here, you asshole!” But the headlights went out.
“You’ll never get to use ‘em.” I had never been so coldly, killing furious in my life. “Back out of here. Now.”
Heard them muttering. Didn’t care. They were already dead. All that remained was the formality of dying. “Aw right!” An aggrieved redneck whine. Backup lights went on. “But this here is a public Goddamn road an’ you’re blockin’ it.”
“You leave and I’ll leave and you can have the damn road.”
The pickup ground backwards out of sight. One final remark — had to have one to save face — drifted through the humid twilight: “Must be some piece of ass, you ready to kill for it.”
I pulled up and belted my pants, ears strained to the sound of the truck in case they stopped. They might get their Cracker danders up. In the dark with shotguns, two on one, they’d have the edge. But the truck went onto San Pablo, tires on pavement, then through the gears and away. Time to get out of here before they changed their mind and came back. I stuck the Colt in my belt, not bothering with my shirt. Backed the Barracuda around. Couldn’t bear to look directly at Glenda in her unzipped dress, one bare knee tucked against her breasts, hair in disarray. In dashboard lights her eyes were enormous and fixed.
I made the road trying to look everywhere at once, and floored it. No pickup was going to catch the Barracuda. I took back roads toward the city before heading east in brooding silence from the other side of the car. Knew we couldn’t show up at home like this. I cut off on a road remembered from high school. Had to stop somewhere to pee. Parked on top of Harvey Hill where you could see traffic coming for miles from either direction.
“I didn’t know Florida had any hills this tall.” Her first words since the possum-hunters showed up.
“This is the only one I know. Harvey Hill. Be right back.”
When I was back in the car she gave a kind of laugh. “Men have all the advantages that way.”
“You can leave the door open and go behind it. I won’t look.”
She laughed with a little more feeling. “Too late. You’ve already seen everything I got.”
I took her hand. “I love you.”
“I was scared to death back there, Ish.”
“Just possum hunters. Probably half-drunk on ‘shine. They were scared too.”
“No wonder!” She squeezed my hand. “You moved so damn fast! And your voice! I got chills. You always pack a gun?”
“If you ever need one, it’s usually too late to go home and get it.” I kissed her hand. “That wasn’t the kind of chills I meant for you to have.”
She was gazing out the windshield again. “I hate being a failure as a woman.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“We were interrupted. That’s all.”
“But before that, I couldn’t — you know.”
“We’re neither one teenagers anymore making out in a car. That damn gas tank bonking every time I…”
“Oh god!” She buried her face in her hands. “I wanted your homecoming to be the sweetest thing, and I ruined it completely.”
I pulled her hands away from her face and forced her to look at me. “Listen to me: you know what the most important thing is that happened tonight? For me?”
“What?”
“You said you love me.”
“Oh, Ish. I do love you. I even tried not to for a long time. But I do. And now it’s just ruined.”
I was exasperated. “Nothing is ruined.” I kissed her. She was inert for a long heartbeat and then kissed back. We snuggled across the bucket seats without the towel. We kissed and touched until she pulled back gently. Her lips curved up.
“I just have to say this.” I heard a return of life and humor. “I absolutely know you’re glad to see me.” She squeezed my resurgent erection. “So can you put the pistol in your belt away? I know it’s not the classic Mae West line, but the metal hurts my boobs.”
We were both laughing when I came back into her arms from tucking the Colt away. I kissed her nipples through her dress to apologize. They hardened instantly. When my fingers worked under her bunched-up hem she was soaking wet. “I told you it was going to be okay.” I scrunched down, raised her legs and put my mouth against her feather-soft pubic thatch. Her fingers laced in my hair. Her hips began a slow, intense tidal roll. I didn’t know if it was my pulse booming or hers, as she clamped her inner thighs against my ears.
She came with a galvanic shudder, pressing her Mons against my upper lip so hard I knew it would re-bruise atop the one left by the little blonde from Brittany. Her whole body seemed to melt around me. Then she jerked with alarm. “Oh, my God!”
I opened my eyes to blinding white headlights — again — and pushed upright. Into the beam of a big flashlight behind which an official-sounding voice was saying: “Are you all right, Ma’am…Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Sir!” The flashlight beam was snatched away. Between high beams behind and the rising moon I made out a Florida State Trooper by the door. He actually tipped his Stetson.“My apologies, Sir. I thought the lady might be stranded alone out here…”
“Thanks. But we’re fine.” I felt her moisture on my lips and chin.
“So I see,” he said dryly. He saw plenty before he diverted the flashlight. “May I suggest getting a room?”
“Same thing my father told me.”
“Wise man. Y’all take care now.” And he was gone.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“I sure was — for about a second.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to say, Ish. We’ve wasted all the time I have. I’m at an Arts Council meeting, just so you know.”
“We haven’t wasted a minute, far as I’m concerned.”
“But what about you? A man gets so frustrated when he’s — uh — when he can’t…” I had no idea then how cruelly her asshole husband had conditioned her to feel guilty for his failures to perform. I took her back in my arms.
“Will you relax?”
“I’m such a failure as a woman!”
“And knock that off.” I felt a laugh building inside. It escaped. “This isn’t you. This is Fate, making fun of me. Offering with one hand, taking away with the other. Like I got drafted just when book royalties were rolling in and things were going good at the newspaper.” I didn’t mention rushing back to Paris too late, the woman already gone whose loving made me adult enough to handle this crazy night. “You honest to God love me?”
“God help me,” she said. “Honest to God I do.”
“Then the rest will work out — however it works out.”
“God, I don’t want to leave you! But…”
But she had to get home to face her life. I released her and keyed the ignition. “I know an all-night gas station that keeps clean restrooms. We can get cleaned up.”
She rearranged her dress. “Good,” she said briskly. “I kept my panties and bra in my handbag so they’d be clean when I went home. I had this crazy idea…”
I was laughing with open delight that she had arrived stripped for action. So to speak. “Nothing crazy about your idea. You got to admit, though, this has been some first date.”
She jabbed me lightly. “Are you okay? Truly?”
“Finer that frog’s hair.”
She broke out laughing too. “I love you, you nut!”
I took a huge breath and let it out. “And I love you.”
