Julip Read online

  Now there was a particularly loud and ragged crash of lightning and Charles and Arthur rushed out yelling incoherently at her. Jesus, she thought, but then the thunder was deafening, the sound throbbing the water in the pool. She became a little frightened, moving to the edge of the pool where they each grabbed an arm and plucked her out, running for the patio door.

  She stood in the kitchen shivering in her undies as they continued to sputter angrily at her. She hugged herself and said, “Yes, Daddy, I’m sorry, Daddy,” trying to make a joke of the whole thing, then immediately wished she could suck the words back like a reversed tape. The lights flickered off and on and the men looked so stricken she thought she could see the skulls beneath their skin. They looked down, up, and away but not at her, with Charles giving off a strangled cough and Arthur gazing up at the ceiling fan.

  “God, I’m sorry,” she said. “What a stupid thing to say.”

  *

  She sat in Charles’s bedroom for about an hour until the rain stopped at twilight, then put on her skirt and blouse, wishing she had a dry pair of underwear. She checked the dresser drawers, putting on a pair of Charles’s Jockeys to amuse herself, tucking them up under her skirt waist so they wouldn’t fall down, then went out to the dining room where Arthur and Charles were sitting on a sofa morosely listening to Spanish guitar music. She flopped down between them, taking a hand of each.

  “I refuse to accept that I fucked up my last night in town,” she said, and Arthur patted her head as a father would. They listened to a man and woman yelling down the street but ignored it, as public quarrels are nothing extraordinary in Key West.

  “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me,” Arthur said without conviction. He got up and put the pans of manicotti in the oven, then said, “Love is no fun.” He opened a magnum of wine and poured himself an enormous glass.

  Charles gave her a hug and got up to make a salad. Julip went over to help and he pinched her ass. “I’m going to start fucking women my own age. I wonder where they hang out,” he said, gulping down Arthur’s glass of wine as if it were water.

  “I’d call Midnight if Ted wasn’t such a geek,” Arthur said, then looked through his wallet for the number. Midnight was an enormous Cuban whore whom Ted found threatening but Arthur adored. Julip had seen her at the Winn-Dixie supermarket with her two little boys and they had chatted about school problems.

  The kitchen air conditioner was on the blink and both Arthur and Charles were sweating profusely, which gave her the idea for a trick. She pushed them back against the counter and began jumping straight up and down until Charles’s underpants slipped down to her ankles. She picked the garment up and wiped the sweat off their faces and shoulders. It was so direct and simple-minded that they were thrilled, but then they heard more yelling, a police siren, and the unmistakable sound of Ted’s voice rising above the other noise.

  *

  At first it was difficult to sort out the mess. Ted was sitting on the sidewalk steps in front of a trim bungalow, holding a clumsily picked bouquet of flowers and a large plastic sack of stone crab claws. He was being guarded by an old woman with a poised walking stick and an old man holding a pistol to his head, plus a minuscule Jack Russell terrier. Julip recognized one of the two cops as Mike, who always winked at her or chatted when she was having lunch at Dennis Pharmacy.

  While the other cop was trying to reason with Ted and the old folks, Mike was waving a few curiosity seekers away, including Charles and Arthur, who had reached the scene just before Julip. Mike whispered to her, “This is one of your boyfriends, right? Don’t worry, that’s a fake pistol, a fucking squirt gun. The guy’s a fucking nut case, kiddo.” Mike waved his billy club at Ted, whose face was garishly lit by the bubble on the cop car, his jaw clenched in self-righteousness, lucidly drunk as he babbled an explanation to the other cop.

  “When I was on a Guggenheim and went to Sweden all flowers, even those on private property, were deemed public property. In short, in civilized countries, including England and France, one can pick a bouquet at random.”

  “Who gives a fuck about foreigners? You came in my yard and picked our flowers,” the old man yelled.

  “Arrest this hippie shitheel!” the old lady demanded.

  “Hippie? It’s strange to call the olive oil king of Florida a hippie. This suit cost me a grand. And I’m keeping the flowers. I’ve been shot in the head before and it doesn’t mean shit to me.”

  The other cop turned to Mike and Julip in despair. Julip asked Mike if she could try, and he led her into the light.

  “Ted, it’s me. Did you get the license? Did you get our marriage license, darling?”

  Ted glanced up at Julip as if she were a space alien, then he slowly recognized her and tried to reach into his pocket. The old man shrieked “Nothing doing!” so Julip leaned over and plucked the license from his suit-coat pocket, handing it to the old lady.

  “Phony baloney,” the old woman said, with less strain than before.

  “We’re supposed to be married tonight.” Julip detached the sack of stone crab claws from Ted’s grasp and handed them to the old lady. “This should be a fair trade for the flowers.”

  “Thanks,” said the old lady, reaching into the sack. “These are big suckers.”

  “They cost me seventy bucks,” Ted whined. “They’re our wedding dinner.”

  “I want a hundred bucks for the flowers or I’m pressing charges on this crumb-bum,” the old man hissed.

  Julip reached inside the small watch pocket of her skirt, drew out one of the hundred-dollar bills Ted had given her to buy a new dress, and handed it to the old man, who was delighted. Feeling antic, he squirted Ted with the fake pistol. Ted fell backward, screaming, “I’m blinded!”

  The old man cackled, “It’s just a little ammonia and water to keep stray dogs from pissing on the flowers!” He retreated to his porch where his wife stood with the stone crab claws. Julip ignored Ted and leaned over to pet the Jack Russell terrier, who was a feisty little sweetheart.

  *

  Back at the house, they rinsed Ted’s eyes — only one was a little pink — and sat him down to sign Julip’s release form. “Whiskey,” he muttered, still refusing to let go of the flowers tightly grasped in his right hand. At first he said he couldn’t sign because the flowers were “locked eternally” in his writing hand and he would finally have to be buried with these “deliquescent” flowers. Julip was so nervous she studied the marriage license, her first; when I’m thirty-one he’ll be fifty-seven, she thought idly. Charles became angry at Ted’s coy refusal, then Arthur took over, keeping a water glass of whiskey just out of Ted’s reach and guiding his left hand through a clumsy signature. Ted gulped at the whiskey, spilling half of it down his shirt, his eyes wobbling as he gazed lovingly across the table with the same bleary affection as her father.

  “Now the little prick can’t shoot his very own brother-in-law.” He began to hiccup from the jolt of straight whiskey. “It’s time to hit the sack, babycakes, my virgin bride.” He lurched to his feet and Charles saved him from falling backward, guiding him over to the couch where he was instantly asleep, snoring mightily. Arthur had to put on a B. B. King tape to make dinner possible.

  *

  It was a fine goodbye dinner indeed, washed down with three magnums of Ruffino Barolo, though Julip sipped sparingly. Charles pried open a wooden box holding a bottle of Sire de Gouberville calvados and they all marveled at its autumnal flavors. Julip only sniffed it and imagined she was walking through an orchard after the first big frost, the windfall apples crunching under her feet. These guys sure have a lot of ways of getting there, she thought, remembering how her father stuck to the pints of Four Roses or Guckenheimer he stowed everywhere.

  By tradition there would have been a few lines of wake-up cocaine and a tour of some bars but the maid’s theft had negated that and neither Charles nor Arthur wanted to check around for any street stuff. Their regular man was a circu
mspect landscape architect who only dealt in daylight hours to avoid the last-minute riffraff. Then Arthur admitted it was probably his fault the coke was gone. A few days before, when the afternoon’s fishing had been rained out and Ted and Charles were at the supermarket, he had tried to seduce the scruffy maid he had discovered sleeping stoned and in the nude on the pool’s diving board, guarded by the dog she took everywhere. The dog was ordinarily amiable but not when it felt its mistress was endangered. Arthur was kept at a distance and the dog threatened him back into the house. He woke her by yelling and waving the bag of dope out the window, whereupon she came to him like a zombie, and he neatly shut out the dog after she entered the house. The upshot was that she must have seen where he stored the bag.

  “You asshole,” Charles said, smiling but drowsy. He put his hand on Julip’s and suddenly his eyes brimmed with tears. She held a finger to her lips so he wouldn’t say anything. Arthur was resting his chin on his arms, his eyes barely open but open enough to form tears, and then he was asleep.

  Charles got up with difficulty and stumbled to his Barca-lounger, covering his face with his hands in a lame attempt to be manly. She took an afghan from the couch, where Ted continued his snoring, and covered Charles. Ted’s face looked like her father’s as he’d slept in the car that morning in blissful sedation against his terrors, real and imagined, it didn’t matter which. She massaged Charles’s neck, standing behind him so he needn’t be embarrassed by his tears.

  “I’ll still train your dogs,” she said.

  “That’s it?” he murmured.

  “That’s it.” She massaged his neck for a few more minutes until his head tilted forward in sleep, then she gathered up the paper for the judge and the marriage license, which she would keep as an absurd souvenir. Before leaving she glanced at each of them and for the briefest chilling moment they looked like petrified babies suspended in dreamless sleep. It certainly was a struggle to have fun, she thought, walking out into the night, a dank and rotting blossom, the low-tide scent sweeping lazily over the city.

  *

  Julip slept the sleep of the righteous and was at the Monroe County courthouse when it opened, dropping off her makeshift signed form at the judge’s office, then on to the prosecutor down the hall. He was late for work and she sat there listening to the receptionist whistle poorly until he came in, looking like he had slept in his car and not alone. He poured himself a cup of coffee and offered her one, which she declined, showing her into his office.

  “You have the look of someone leaving town in a hurry,” he said.

  “Yes sir. I’ve got work to do back home.” She noted that he had the accent of some of her father’s hunting friends from Mississippi.

  “I talked to Hinckley up in Starke, also to the judge. I’m going to have to insist on at least a year’s detainment for your brother at a mental facility — more, of course, if deemed necessary. The psychologist of record, Wiseman, seems to think his delusions were caused by the death of his father, abandonment by his mother, the defilement of his baby sister by some rich playboys.”

  “I’m actually a year older,” Julip interjected.

  “Where I come from in Greenville, Mississippi, you’re still the baby sister.”

  “Yes sir. Did you use that word ‘defilement’ at the trial?”

  “Yes. Probably. I always liked the word, don’t you? I think I said that despite the fact that his sister had been defiled, the young man had no right to take the law into his own hands. Why?”

  “I just wondered. I want to thank you.” Julip got up, feeling a little lightheaded at the end of the road.

  “If you’re still around at noon, I’d like to take you to lunch,” he said, showing her to the door.

  Just for fun she gave him the open-faced “anything is possible” look Marcia had taught her. “Maybe next time I’m down here,” she said.

  *

  By noon Julip was in a phone booth at the north end of Seven Mile Bridge, offering Mildred to spend a day working Jung if she wanted, since the next day was Saturday. Mildred accepted, inviting her to stay that night, even though Julip was going to arrive late, because it was full moon and she and her husband were going to be up late drinking Bordeaux and watching all the film versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After Julip hung up the phone she stared at the heavy southbound traffic heading from Miami down the Keys, glad she was going in the other direction. A girl in a red convertible was beeping aimlessly, stuck behind a line of slow-moving pickups trailering boats. She looked closer, startled to see that it was Marcia, no doubt heading south to help her out with the Boys. She was certainly welcome. Despite the heat Julip shivered, waiting until Marcia’s car was well out on the bridge before she walked to her own car and headed north, eager to get back to the dogs.

  The Seven-Ounce Man

  I

  BACK HOME

  IT WAS THE DARKEST and coldest summer of the century in the Upper Peninsula, or so everyone said. When in groups people spoke in muffled dirge noises; alone, their soul speech was a runt-of-the-litter whimper. If you were awake the night of the summer solstice, perhaps driving home from a tavern, you saw snowflakes. You wanted them to be a hatch of summer bugs but they were definitely snowflakes. Then the night of the Glorious Fourth, when multicolored pyrotechnic bombs burst in the air over Escanaba’s harbor, folks huddled in their heated cars or sat on blankets in their snowmobile suits. By dawn every tomato plant in town lay supine under a crust of hoarfrost. The sturdier peas survived but the pods were already atrophied by the frigid dankness of June.

  It was to be a summer without the pleasures of sweet corn, tans, beach parties, and most disastrously, tourism. Bridge crossings over the “mighty Mackinac” dropped to an all-time low along with beer sales. A trickle of diehard, dour downstaters with shiny vehicles arrived — RVs towing compact cars that in turn towed boats — but few of them other than the campers, known locally as bologna eaters, unlike the most welcome kind of tourists who stayed in motels and ate in restaurants. Even the bears suffered and became scrawny from the failure of the wild berry crop, invading the outskirts of town for garbage cans and toothsome household pets.

  *

  Since Brown Dog was not given to lolling on beaches he did not mind the weather which stayed right around a daytime high of forty-nine degrees, actually his favorite temperature among all the possibilities. He liked the symmetry involved in the idea that his favorite driving speed and temperature were the same. His grandpa had always said that nobody ever got killed driving below fifty so Brown Dog kept it at forty-nine, kissing the inside limit of fatality. The real problem was that he no longer had his own vehicle, what with Rose totaling the old Dodge van against a birch tree on her way home from her job cleaning the Indian casino. He visited the junkyard as if it were a grave site, fondly patting the undamaged parts, caressing the metallic wounds, a lump forming in his throat as he said goodbye to his beloved vehicle.

  Where Brown Dog hurt the most, though, was in the double pocket of love and money. The truth was that he was out of both, the pockets utterly empty, and there didn’t seem to be a philosophical or theological palliative for the condition. The presence of one somewhat consoles the absence of the other, and when one possesses neither, the soul is left sucking a very bad egg indeed — say, one that got nudged into a corner of straw in the hen house and was discovered far too many months later. What’s more, he was dealing with a bum knee from a logging accident, and the five percent of the net profits from the Wild Wild Midwest Show had not “eventuated,” as they say these days.

  *

  The October before, he had rediscovered his childhood sweetheart, Rose, though it must be said that Rose had never offered a single gesture of affection in their youth, and she wasn’t overly forthcoming in the present. To think of her as a sweetheart at all would be called a far reach, in sailing terms. She was born mean, captious, sullen, with occasional small dirty windows of charm. The pail of pig slop she had dumped on Br
own Dog’s head when he was the neighbor boy might have been a harbinger for a sensible man, but as a sentimentalist he was always trying to get at the heart of something that frequently didn’t have a heart. For instance, the afternoon Brown Dog had showed up after twenty-five years and taken off with Rose’s ten-year-old son, Red, and seven-year-old retarded (fetal alcohol syndrome) daughter, Berry, for the first taxi ride for any of them, all the way up to Marquette to retrieve Brown Dog’s van, he had returned to discover that Rose had drunk ten of the twelve beers he had dropped off, plus eaten most of the two chickens. There was a leg apiece for Berry and Red, and two wings for Brown Dog. Rose grandly split the remaining two beers with him, which made the score eleven to one. Her mother, Doris, only said, affably enough, that Rose was a pig.

  Still, it was a homecoming, and when he stepped outside to quell his anger (and hunger) in the cold air he was amazed that Fate had brought him back, with her peculiar circuitry, to the small farm where his grandfather had raised him. It was a pretty good feeling that after the real threat of prison he had arrived back here even though the home was no longer his. But well behind his boyhood love for Rose and its resurgence at the not very tender age of forty-two, back in some primitive dovecote, there was the worry that he might not be invited to stay. The Son of Man might not have a place to lay his head, he remembered from the Bible, and this was not allayed by the nine hundred bucks in his pocket. He was one of the few poor people in creation who actually knew that money didn’t buy happiness, this knowledge due to the fact that he always squandered money at touch, which left the dullish feeling of a head cold.