Second Skin (23 page)

“That’s the name of my husband. Red. Isn’t it beautiful?”

He agreed that it was.

“Where’s the Salerno kid?” I asked, and it was a thick green whispered question. “Don’t you want to show him too?”

But Red was already helping her up the ladder and we were coming in.

And then Miranda was waving from the end of the jetty: “Ahoy,
Peter Poor
, welcome home!” And half a dozen stray young kinky-faced sheep were huddled in front of her on the end of the jetty and calling for mother.

“Boy, oh boy, are you a sight!” Miranda said. And then they kissed, and from where I sat propped on the jetty I looked and saw our skins piled high amidships on the
Peter Poor.
Our wretched skins. And above the pile with the black strap looped over his steel hook and the rest of it hanging down, Jomo was standing there and holding out his arm and grinning.

“Got something of yours, Miranda,” he called. “You want it?”

And laughing, and arm in arm with Cassandra: “You bet your life,” she cried, “bring it along!”

Silence. Shadows. A moonlit constellation of little hard new blueberries against the picket fence. An early spring. The glider was jerking back and forth beneath me and grinding, squeaking, arguing with itself like a wounded crow. And the bottle of Old Grand-Dad lay at my foot and I sat with glass in hand.

“Now go to bed, will you, Skip? My God. She’s probably gone to the show with Bub. That’s all. What’s wrong with that?”

The Labradors came out of their kennel, one head above the other, and looked at us—at me in the painful shadows of the
glider and at Miranda sitting on the porch rail with her head against the post and one big knee beneath her chin—and sat down on their black bottoms and began to howl. The Labradors, Miranda’s blunt-nosed ugly dogs, were howling for my own vigil and for Miranda’s silhouette, because Miranda was wearing her black turtle-neck sweater and a Spanish dancer’s short white ruffled skirt which the raised knee had slipped into her solid lap like a pile of fresh white roses.

“Even the dogs know she’s not with Bub,” I said, cracking the neck of the bottle quickly and gently on the lip of the glass, “nobody can fool those dogs, Miranda. Nobody. They’re not howling for the fun of it.”

Wasn’t she looking at her fingernails in the moonlight? Wasn’t she studying the tiny inverted moonlit shields, one hand curved and fluted and turning at arm’s length in front of her face, and then the other, peering at her enormous hands and yawning? Of course she was. Because it was May and time for Miranda to appraise her big waxen fingernails by light of the moon. And even in the chill of the late May night I knew there would be no goose flesh on her big waxen silhouetted leg, no hair on the smooth dark calf.

“You’re an old maid, Skip. Honest to God.”

And staring out at the chestnut tree that was trying to pull itself into leaf once more, I lifted my chin and smiled and drooped the comers of my mouth: “I’m afraid I can’t say the same for you. Far from it. But I tell you, Miranda,” tasting the iodine taste of the Old Grand-Dad on my heavy tongue, sitting on the head of a spring and holding it under, “I’ll give her five more minutes, just five, Miranda, and then I’m going to Red’s shack and pray to the BVM. that I’m still in time.”

She laughed.

But I meant it. Yes, I meant still in time, because there had been the rest of March and April with no more mishaps, nothing but Cassandra suddenly light on her feet and fresh and helpful around the house, Cassandra spending all our last days of winter walking from room to room in the old clapboard house with Pixie held tight in her arms and some kind of song just audible in her severe little nose. Now it was May and Cassandra had
changed again and as I must have felt and was soon to know, it was the last of my poor daughter’s months. So still in time. I needed to be still in time. Because of March and then May and then June and the last thoughts, fragments, high lights of the time that swept us all away.

“Laugh if you want to, Miranda,” I said. “You have nothing to lose.”

“For God’s sake, Skip,” looking my way, plucking the ruffles, resting a long dark hand on the angle of the silhouetted thigh, “and what about you, Skip? What about you?”

She must have known what I had to lose since she destroyed it for me. She must have known since she arranged for the destruction, nursed it, brought it about, tormented both herself and myself with its imminence, with the shape of the flesh, the lay of the soul, the curving brawn that was always gliding behind her plan. And what a vision she must have had of the final weeks in May, since the abortive outcome had already been determined, as only she could have known, on a windy day in March.

So I was about to tell her what I had to lose, was sitting forward on the edge of a broken-down glider and collecting myself against the loud irritating pattern of her asthmatic wheeze—she was still propped on the veranda rail with her long heavy legs exposed, but she was wheezing now, staring at me out of her big dark invisible eyes and wheezing—when the black hot rod shot around the comer by the abandoned Poor House and roared toward us down the straightaway of the dark narrow dirt road, honked at us—triple blaring of the musical horn—and disappeared among the fuzzy black trunks of the larches which were tall and young and mysterious in our brimming spring. And I jumped from the glider and reached the rail in time to see the fat anatomical silver tubes on the side of the engine, the silver disks masking the hub caps, the little fat squirrel tail whipping in circles on the tip of the steel aerial, and, behind the low rectangles of window glass, the two figures in the cut-down chariot for midnights under a full moon. It was traveling without lights.

“You see?” I said, “there she goes! And with Jomo—in Jomo’s
hot rod, Miranda—not with Bub. Who’s the old maid now, Miranda?”

Old Grand-Dad flat on the floor. Kitchen tumbler sailing out and smashing, splintering, on the roof of the kennel. And I was off the porch and once more running after my destiny which always seemed to be racing ahead of me on black tires.

“Wait a minute, Skip,” she cried then, “I’m coming with you!”

So once again with Miranda I entrusted myself to the other hot rod that was still behind her house—orange and white and blue and bearing the number five in a circle on the hood—but this time I myself sat at the wheel and this time, thanks to Bub who had worked on the car as Miranda had said he would, this time that hot rod was a racing vehicle with a full tank of high-octane gasoline, and this time it was spring and the tires were pumped up tight and the fresh paint was bright and tacky.

“Now, Cicisbeo,” I muttered, and we swung out onto Poor House Road, took up the chase.

No lights. No muffler. No windshield, no glass in the windows, and I was low in the driver’s seat with my foot pushed to the hot floor and my fat hands slick and white on the smooth black steering wheel. Miranda crouched beside me, long hair snapping out on the wind and white skirt bunching and struggling in her powerful arms.

“If they gave us the slip,” I shouted, “good-by everything! I hope you’re glad….”

Moonlight. Black shadows. Soft silk of the dirt road around the island, and larches, uncut brambles at the side of the road and a dead net hanging down from a luminous branch, and the occasional scent of brine and charcoal smoke on the breakneck wind, and every few hundred feet a water rat leapt from some hollow log or half-buried conduit, dashed under our wheels.

“It’s all your doing,” I shouted. “I hope you’re glad!”

Shaking loose her hair and bunching the white foam of the ruffled skirt up to her breasts, Miranda was larger and whiter and more Venus-like than ever that night, and as we accelerated suddenly onto the silver flats of one of my favorite cow pastures—cows dead and gone, of course, but an open stubbled
place in sight of the sea—I knew that in Miranda’s eyes I was not the man to win a hot rod race. So I swerved a couple of times and gunned her, set my jaw. I had taken my chances in this very car before, and Miranda or no Miranda, now I would have my moment of inspired revenge. As we thundered across the bumpy moonlit field I made up my mind: the sea. The black sea. Nothing to do but run the one-handed lecherous Jomo into the black sea.

The road, the wash of stubble, the moonlit mounds of powdered shells, the prow of a beached dory, and off to the right the lighthouse and straight ahead a glimpse of the black-lacquered cut-down car we were chasing. I felt relentless.

“Come on, Skip, do your stuff! Good God! ” Somehow she had gotten her enormous legs onto the seat and was kneeling and holding the skirt above her belly with one hand and with the other was clutching me around the shoulders. Her hot breath was in my ear, I heard the rising and falling roar of the beehives that were laboring away inside her enormous chest.

“No!” I cried, “Stop! You’ll kill us both, Miranda!”

But she hung on, tightened her grip and snuggled her great black and white head down onto my shoulder. Her hair flew into my eyes and even into my open mouth. And tongue, teeth, hair, I was trying to breathe through my nose and gagging, choking, but somehow keeping my grip on the wheel and driving on. But was she trying to comfort me, encourage me, even love me, at least urge me to great daring after all? Had I been wrong about Miranda?

I knew the answer of course. And yet before I could spare a hand off the wheel or risk a glance in her direction, the other car had come into view again and was heading not for the dunes as I had expected but down toward the hard dark sand of Dog’s Head beach which stretched northward about a mile and a half from the abandoned light. I saw him, swung the wheel in time, and followed him, tried to catch him midway between the Poor House Road and the beach. But I had no such luck.

The black car turned northward away from the empty lighthouse on Dog’s Head beach, and for a moment we were close
enough to see the silver disks on the wheels, the two silhouetted heads, the aerial in its whip position. Hot rod, driver, passenger, they seemed to crawl for a moment in a slow fanning geyser of packed sand, and I stuck my fist out of the window. “Beware, Cicisbeo!” I shouted this time, and stepped on the gas.

Off again, the black car leading up the wide wet stretch of deserted beach, black car racing close to the dark water’s edge and filling the air with spray, flecks of foam, exhaust, a screen of burning sand. The aluminum exhaust pipes curving out of the lacquered hood were loud, musical, three or four bright pipes of power. Even Miranda lifted her head, leaned forward now and fought the driving wind to see.

“Faster, Skip!” she shouted, and despite winds, sand, uncertain motion, she bounced up and down on the edge of the seat, whacked me rhythmically on fat arm, knee, shoulder.

Two unlighted hammerheaded cars on a moonlit beach, and three times we raced up and down that beach which had been exposed only hours before by a choppy sea, three times up and down from the north end of low boulders to the south end of tall grass and broken faces of cliff and abandoned lighthouse, and three times he tricked me with his sudden and skillful turns, three times he made his turn and left me driving flat out toward disaster among the sleeping boulders or a crash against the cliff. And wasn’t he leading me on? Leading me toward a nightconsuming accident on the lonely beach?

But I got the hang of it then, so to speak, and made a short turn and cut him off. A surprise blow. Simple maneuver but effective. Quick action of a dangerous mind.

“Got him now, Miranda,” I shouted. “Rapacious devil!”

And we were drifting together, that black hot rod and mine, and I was inching in closer to him and then ahead, fighting for the position from which I would cut him off, sailing out now to the left, now to the right on the treacherous sand and giving her the gun again. Side by side in the sound of speed. Shadows cast by the moon were scudding ahead of us, and there were sharp rocks waiting for us in the cold sea and I could make out the dark slippery festoons of kelp.

“Hold on, Cassandra,” I shouted out of the window, “it won’t be long!” I smelled the night, the salt, the armies of mussels and clams ground under our wheels and the dense smoke of our high-octane fuel. And the excitement touched the backs of my hands, told me the time was near, and I wondered how he could have been foolish enough to trap himself here on Dog’s Head beach, how foolish enough to underestimate my courage, the strength of my love. I was half a radiator length ahead of him and Miranda might have touched that black-lacquered car had she held out her hand.

“Now!” I shouted, “Now!” and swung down on the wheel and smelled the rank sizzling cremation of the brake bands as we stopped short of the moonlit choppy waters—half-spin in the sand but safe, dry, coming to a sudden and miraculous standstill—while the black car went pitching in. It pitched headlong into the rising tide and rocked, floundered, stalled. Smacked one of the rocks.

I fumbled for the ignition and fought the door, using fist, shoulder, heels of both palms. “Get your hook ready,” I cried, “I’m coming after you!” And once more I was running until I too hit the shock of the cold water and suddenly found myself knee-deep in it but running in slow motion, still running toward the half-submerged black-lacquered hot rod wrecked on this bitter shore. Already it was bound in kelp, already the cold waters were wallowing above the crankcase, already the thick white salt was sealing up forever those twin silver carburetors which Jomo had buffed, polished, installed, adjusted beside the battered gas pump in front of Red’s shack. Half-sunken now, wet and black and pointing out to sea in the moonlight.

“Game’s up, Jomo, don’t try anything, …”

And my two hands went under water and gripped the door handle. My soggy foot was raised high and thrust flat against the side of the car. And then I pulled and there was the suck of the yielding door, the black flood and, baseball cap and all, I dragged him out by the arm and shook him, wrestled with him, until I slipped and we both went under.

And then up again and, “You!” I cried, “It’s you!” and I
threw him off his feet again and lunged into the car just as Miranda began laughing her breasty deep Old Grand-Dad laugh at the edge of the beach. I lunged into the car and reached out my hand and stopped, because it was not Cassandra. Because it was nothing. Nobody at all. A mere device, a laundry bag for a torso, something white rolled up for a head. Oh, it was Bub all right, Bub wearing Jomo’s cap and driving Jomo’s car. Bub’s trick. Bub’s decoy. And it had worked. Oh, it had worked all right, and while I was risking my neck in Miranda’s blue and white and orange hot rod and making my foolish laps on Dog’s Head beach or standing hip-deep in the biting black waters of the Atlantic, my Cassandra was lying after all in the arms I had tried to save her from, and falling, fading, swooning, going fast.