“You need anything?”
He shook his head, more to get rid of the sound of my voice than in answer. The young punk who might be his son had made a sound, and he didn’t need to hear such sounds this early.
I held up my hands defensively, stood, walked into the bathroom as she was coming out. The porcelain bath was huge, like the shell of some monstrous clam dredged from the depths of Atlantis, as deeply berthed as a Catholic baptistry. A green plastic bath seat clung to the side of the tub. Nonstick decals and rubber mats made to look like cute cartoon frogs and lily pads covered the floor. I washed my hands in the sink, dried my hands on a towel on the rack. I returned to the bedroom, but the old man had left.
“Where d’you go?” My voice echoed through the empty stone rooms as I walked, still barefooted. I let my overlong jeans sag so I could use some dungaree fabric to cover my cold feet as I waddled.
Luna’s laugh was a clarion bird titter. “Your uncle’s fast when he wants to be.”
I stepped through the kitchen where Luna hovered over a griddle on top of which several corn shells were grilling and a row of eggs fried. “Go into the main room, then veer right.” She pointed the blackened spatula toward the room where I’d first entered with my mom.
I did as She-of-the-Spatula bade and entered the room, bright with the light of daybreak like all the others.
“Gay Blade of the Gillette Cavalcade!”
I followed the sound of his voice toward the right, though it was hard to locate the source the way all noise echoed around this cavern. I found him in a plush den, the footrest up on his Geri-Chair, his slip-on shoes kicked off. His posture said that he was the Alpha Male of a rest home, king of all bingo games and crochet-crafts tables he surveyed. A solid state radio, like the speaker in a fast-food joint from the fifties, sat on a wooden end table beneath a lamp topped with a cognac-colored shade. It wasn’t as old as one of those sets where the label featured a dog listening to a gramophone horn with his ear perked up, but it was vintage.
Classical music came out of the thing and the man leaned back farther in his sofa-chair, letting the music of the ages wash over him and remove all earthly pains. He smiled with his eyes closed, seeing something pass before the canvas of his mind’s eye. Whatever he saw there was none of my business.
I left him in peace and walked around the room, contented by the dull sizzle of the cooking sounds crackling from the kitchen and the frenetic violin music coming from the radio in front of me.
The room was all gingerbread brown gewgaws, like the quickie marriage roadside chapels they had in Vegas where a fat Elvis in sequined Kung-fu outfit officiated. There was some older stuff too, including a mahogany bar back, a relic from a Barbary Coast 19th-century brothel.
“Better not let Debbie see this place or she’ll strip it for parts.” I spoke more to myself than him.
His grin was sly, his face pulling into a smile against his will. I thought he’d not only heard me, but had understood me. I was convinced he would deny it if pressed. I knew that he was sick and old, and that some of that sickness had touched his mind or maybe even eaten parts of it, but I think he also knew how to pretend to be out of it when it was convenient for him.
I had a smart man in front of me I suddenly knew, and for reasons I didn’t understand I somehow saw him now not as pitiful, but as an opponent in some conflict. But in what? A fight for Luna’s love? I was sixteen and still (a little) pudgy, and this guy was on his way out. Neither one of us were getting anywhere with her.
And I still didn’t know why I was so attracted to her. Sure, she was pretty and the only woman around, and I was sixteen, which was enough reason to stick my dick in anything short of a garbage disposal if given the green light. But there was something else, something abiding that kept making my double takes turn into lingering looks, which had turned into tossing in bed last night, clutching my pillow and pretending it was her.
Yet her presence, or even the ghost of her presence, had been there with me in the room, making it hard or more like downright impossible to whack off thinking about her. She wasn’t just off-limits for me in reality; she even resisted incorporation into my fantasies. And I had a good imagination.
Maybe I would try again when stoned. Good weed got me horny, dropped inhibitions like drinking but without the undercurrent of violence.
“I like Luna too,” he said.
“What?”
“Here we are,” Luna suddenly said, her voice breaking the thick air that lingered between me and the old man in his chair. He opened his eyes, blinking rapidly like a lizard as he accepted a tray of pulped orange juice in a fluted glass and a stoneware plate topped with a Southwest omelet.
“He’s at his most lucid in the morning,” Luna said.
“I noticed that.”
“So if you want to tell him something or ask him something…” Her voice trailed off.
“What is there to ask?” he asked and waved a fork where some green pepper and a fluff of egg dangled from the tines. “It’s all here.”
I looked around the room, at the framed photos on the walls, at the certificates of appreciation from this chamber-of-commerce or that hotel, “Thank You’s” to him for opening a golf tournament or christening some ship. This was the only room that didn’t have a desert décor, and the wainscoting showed at least one picture or medal per panel of antiqued wood.
A life well-lived.
Beneath a set of pica spears (either faintly stained with the blood of some long-dead bull or oxidized with rust), there was a picture of him on the cover of Leatherneck magazine. It was a black-and-white photo bleached to sepia by time. He stood in his fatigues with a set of cherry-red oversized boxing gloves on his fists, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “The Best Fighting Marine since Gene Tunney.”
I looked over at him. “Who’s Gene Tunney?”
He snorted to beat a bull, almost to pull a wad of scrambled egg through the roof of his mouth and into his flaring nostrils. “Some pansy-ass who got lucky against Jack Dempsey.”
I didn’t know who that was, but at least the name sounded familiar. I would ask Mr. Hurley when I got back to Redrock. If I went back. My mind was already scrambling for excuses to stay in this stone mansion in the middle of nowhere. Mom, I want to stay here, take care of him, get my nurse’s certificate, like Luna.