The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (11 page)

 

 

 

 

T
he damage to Harold's hand was not life-threatening, although the pain after that initial clamping was ferocious. Holding his hand up in the air was helpful, something learnt from an injury received as a child while playing basketball. It was his mother, eyes glazed, a glass of whisky in one hand, who had shoved his fingers towards the clouds.

The blood issuing from his squashed nails upset Rose; there were even tears in her eyes. He was about to reassure her that it wasn't that bad when he realised it might be advantageous to let her think it was serious. She had been implying over break­ fast that they should bypass Los Angeles and drive straight to Malibu. He hadn't told her that a previous telephone call made it clear that Wheeler had booked out three days ago.

Rose insisted someone should look at his hand. The man­ ager of the inn sent for a member of staff who bathed the crushed fingers in disinfectant before applying a bandage. A sling was produced but Rose objected to its use. She said he wouldn't be able to hold the wheel, not properly.

‘I'm not thinking of driving,' he told her, ‘not for a day or two. It wouldn't be safe.'

‘That's all right,' she said. ‘I'll hitchhike.'

‘You can't,' he protested. ‘It's dangerous.'

‘You don't have to worry,' she retorted, ‘I went all over England in lorries when I was a child.'

‘To hell with England,' he shouted, ‘this is America. Set foot alone on the road and you could end up stabbed, shot, stran­ gled . . .' He was about to add ‘raped' when he remembered his own behaviour of the night before. Wincing, he clutched the wrist of his damaged hand. For once she didn't argue, nor did she walk away. He reckoned she was feeling guilty at the harm she'd done.

They remained at the inn for two nights. Rose said that it would be cheaper to sleep in the van, but he argued that with the temperature now above 100 degrees it would be impossi­ ble to sleep without air conditioning; he didn't mention that she stank of perspiration.

He insisted she come with him to see the historic railway station, Casa del Deserto, now derelict, that stood beside the line that had linked Kansas City with the Pacific. She gave him a funny look, but followed him as he strode down Main Street. Once there, she stared at the ruined facade while he explained that a century ago the region had been famous for mining gold and silver.

‘Why does everything have a foreign name?' she asked.

‘Because most of the land belonged to Mexico before gold was discovered.'

‘The gold rush,' she chirped. ‘I saw Charlie Chaplin in the film.'

‘When the mines went dry the immigrants moved on. That's why there's so many ghost towns.'

She began to burble away about the greed of people and how everyone got ruined by wealth. ‘My father,' she said, ‘was made bankrupt in 1929. He was so into money that he didn't think about moonlight or flowers.'

Harold turned his head away and gazed up at the sea-blue sky. He wondered how much longer he would be able to put up with her childish and ignorant pronouncements.

‘We had a rose garden,' she said, ‘that he let die from lack of fertiliser. My mother cried.'

‘Wheeler has money,' he interrupted, and added, ‘Me too.'

It shut her up. After all, where would she be without his own healthy investments?

On the third morning, Rose didn't answer his knock at her door. Alarmed, he hurried into the breakfast room, then out into the street. She was sitting on the veranda of a clapboard shack, talking to herself. He rebuked her for wandering off and she told him she'd met a nice man who'd taught her a song. He pulled her upright and marched her back into the inn. She only had coffee this time and didn't ask the usual questions about how long it was going to take to get to Malibu. She lit a cigarette, smoked half of it and stuffed the remainder into her raincoat pocket.

‘That black man said there's been a shooting on a farm about a mile away,' she said. ‘A woman in a wheelchair. She's not dead.'

He remarked that shootings were commonplace; looking down at his plate he heard the increased thudding of his heart.

‘And he taught me a song,' Rose said, and recited:

 

We grub de bread,

Dey gub us de crust

We skim de pot,

De gub us de liquor

And say dat's good enough for niggers.

 

‘For God's sake,' he hissed, ‘there are riots all over the States at the moment, mostly on account of prejudiced people like you. You can't use that word.'

‘I'm sorry,' she faltered, looking genuinely upset, ‘I just thought it was an interesting song written by slaves. They used the word niggers . . .'

‘Even the names of hills and rivers that once contained the word have been changed,' he told her. ‘That's how unusable it is.'

‘But we passed through a place called Nigger Creek . . .'

‘Leave it,' he said, but she wouldn't.

‘It's no different from you being called a Yankee,' she shouted, ‘you're all American.' Then she rambled on about an English politician who had apparently got into trouble for saying there were too many coloured people coming into Great Britain. ‘It was only a couple of weeks ago,' she said. ‘He warned that if it carried on we'd see the Thames foaming with blood.'

Curtly he told her to collect her belongings, and strode out to the camper.

 

Los Angeles was ninety-three miles away. Harold avoided Route 66 and chose deserted country roads. There was noth­ ing to be seen from the window but farmland edged by the swooning blur of sun-drenched mountains. After an hour, he came to a halt. Now that he was near the end of his jour­ ney, his elation was mixed with fear. It would have helped to confide in his travelling companion, but that's all she was.

Rose asked what was wrong. He thought of saying they were out of gas. Looking at her face—her pale lips appeared to be quivering—for one crazy moment he felt it might be possible to tell her the truth. But that was out of the question. She would hardly allow him to harm her precious Dr. Wheeler.

He said, reaching under the seat, ‘I need a drink. My hand hurts.'

She said, ‘Go ahead. It'll do you good.' She even unscrewed the top for him and would have held it to his mouth if he hadn't snatched the bottle away. He was aware she was watching him, her mouth curved in a patient smile. ‘Does drink help?' she asked.

‘Nothing helps,' he snapped. ‘How could it?'

Reluctantly, he offered her the bottle but she said she didn't really need it, that she had funny enough thoughts as it was. She lived, she confessed, mostly in the past. The here and now meant little to her; it was what made her so unusual. That struck him as comic, she being so unaware of the impression she gave, but he didn't laugh.

‘I wouldn't have taken you for a drinker,' she said. ‘You're not the type. You don't have things that torment you.'

Gazing out of the open window, he saw an image of Wheeler in an invalid chair float across the blinding sky.

Rose was talking to herself again. Seeing his look, she told him she was arguing with her father. She said she often did this because, being dead, he couldn't answer back. He didn't comment; he was trying to work out where and how he might confront Wheeler. If Wheeler was involved in the Democratic presidential campaign he'd hardly be found wandering around on his own. Ideally, their meeting needed to be in a solitary place, somewhere so isolated that they wouldn't be seen, otherwise there was the danger that someone might come up with a description . . . even a snapshot. Perhaps he should shave off his beard.

‘Funny thing is,' Rose said, ‘although he was a bully, he was a terrible crybaby. Once, he went all over Southport pressing sixpences into the hands of those he called our gallant boys in blue . . .'

It might, he thought, be a good idea to telephone John Fury.

‘They were soldiers from the new hospital down by the promenade. My father told them that he was proud of them, that they were the walking wounded . . .'

Fury, Harold reasoned, would know where Kennedy and his gang were likely to be.

‘Afterwards it turned out there was nothing wrong with them, nothing wounded that is. They were soldiers all right, Mother said, but they'd all caught a nasty men's disease from being in the army.'

He pictured Wheeler's face, his expression, the image sear­ ing into his mind.

Rose said, ‘I'm scared about seeing him. It's been so long. What if he's not the same person?'

It jolted him, her having the same thoughts as himself.

Thirty minutes later he parked in a campsite off the San Bernardino Freeway. Clutching his hand he said he needed to rest, but first he must make a telephone call. Rose objected, on the grounds that he should stop thinking about stocks and shares and concentrate on his health. ‘My health,' he retorted, ‘is dependent on money.'

A woman answered his call and informed him that Fury would be back the following day, the second of June. He could be reached at his Santa Ana address. On his return, he was astonished to find that Rose had unfurled the mattress and hung up the mosquito net. As she was being so helpful he decided to tell her what he planned to do the next day. He assured her that Los Angeles was pretty close to Santa Ana and that the sooner they made contact with Fury and got to know the exact location of Senator Kennedy the sooner they'd track down Wheeler. Rose made no comment, just pulled a face.

 

 

 

 

S
anta Ana had pretty houses adorned with white awnings, along streets parading under palm trees. It reminded Rose of Southport, though there weren't any fairy lights. Coming round a corner, the camper had to swerve out of the path of a small boy walking his dog. Harold swore.

Fury's farm was a mile or so out of town, down a dirt track gloomy with foliage. Ahead lay a courtyard edged with what Rose took to be stables, on account of a horse's head poking out. There was also a parched two-storied house, paint peel­ ing, bordering a stretch of butter-coloured grassland. She didn't really register the scene because she was concentrating on Dr. Wheeler. For too many days he had drifted away, ceased to talk, become nothing but a shadow. She hoped this was because they were about to meet, but feared it had to do with him being dead. It wasn't easy to make contact with the departed, not unless one had watched them go.

They were approached by a young man in a yellow sweater who was lugging sacks. Rose didn't like the way Washington Harold treated him. To get over his curt command to be taken to see Fury, she smiled a lot and even winked. Just because he was foreign didn't mean he didn't have feelings.

Fury was out, but he had a wife, a small woman wearing jodhpurs and spectacles. She was called Philopsona, or some­ thing like that. She lived most of the year on the horse farm in order to take care of her elderly mother who, she confided, could no longer live in Los Angeles after being traumatised by events some twenty years before. Her mother sat in a chair overlooking the fields, dressed in a nightie and a straw hat, clutching a woolly rabbit and the remains of a charred handbag.

When Fury at last appeared he played glad to see them. He shook hands with Harold and kissed Rose on the cheek. His lips were cold. Soon after, he and Harold walked out into the yard, leaving Rose alone with the mother-in-law. Philopsona was busy raking up horse poo from the path below the house.

There was an enlarged photograph on the sitting-room wall of a building on fire, and another of a city in ruins. Rose was turning away from them when Mrs Fury's mother said, ‘I was there.' Her voice was confident, her eyes glittering; she was someone still endeavouring to make sense of the present. Rose wasn't surprised; most of her own life had been spent dwelling on the wounds of the past.

‘My mother is dead,' the woman said, which, considering her age, was only to be expected. ‘She was buried in a pink nightgown and my Pa put pink roses on her grave owing to having humped her into the ground.'

‘It must have looked nice,' said Rose.

The woman urged her to come closer. ‘Pink has to do with lusts of the flesh . . . and my Pa told me that the name Rose is in memory of the woman of Babylon.'

Rose tried to look interested. ‘Babylon . . .' she murmured.

‘She was the first prostitute.'

A tap dance of hooves sounded from the cobbles beneath the window, followed by a shrill whistle. Leaning out, Rose saw the young man in the sweater beckoning her to come down. ‘I'll be back,' she reassured the old woman.

Fury wanted Rose to see his horses. He had, he said, been breeding them for twenty years, owing to an interest fostered in childhood by a distant relative. It was the smell of them he liked, the heady mixture of sex and speed. There was another man with him, a Mr. Silver, who had a pot belly and wore a bow tie. He acted very friendly to Rose; whenever he spoke to her his arm circled her shoulder.

Rose reached out to touch the solitary animal. It immedi­ ately reared backwards, nostrils quivering. It was, said Fury, awaiting an injection to protect it from some horsey disease.

‘It sure recognises a wild spirit,' joked Mr. Silver, pulling Rose close.

Before they returned to the house, Fury took Harold to one side and babbled into his ear for some minutes.

‘He's apologising for his wife,' Silver told Rose. ‘She's on the rough side.'

‘Rough?' echoed Rose.

‘He was only eighteen when he met her. It was a love match, at first, but she's hardly the typical lawyer's wife. That's why it's convenient to have her living in Santa Ana.'

‘What's wrong with her?' asked Rose, intrigued.

‘Mostly her language,' provided Silver. ‘That and her gen­ erosity. She keeps giving money away.'

Philopsona cooked them lunch, the ingredients home­ grown, even the chicken. The birds, she trumpeted, were her pride and joy, each one with a name and fondled from birth. She never allowed anyone but herself to wring their necks. ‘It wouldn't be right,' she assured Rose. ‘They need somebody they can fucking trust!' The one they were about to devour was called Nessie.

While waiting for the meal to be served, Rose again exam­ ined the photographs on the wall. Below, on the mantelpiece, she admired a green ornament.

‘It's a frog,' Philopsona told her. ‘My Pa liked frogs.'

‘It's a toad,' corrected Rose. ‘Frogs don't have toes.'

‘What?' said Philopsona. ‘Who gives a shit?'

The food served, her mother, seated at the end of the table, kept picking up pieces and smashing them down with her fork.

‘I only like fat,' she told Rose, ‘I need the dribble.' At which, her daughter shouted, ‘For Christ's sake, Ma, keep your god­ damn mouth shut.' Seeing Rose's shocked expression, Philop­sona patted her knee and confided that Ma was used to such treatment.

‘At least,' she said, ‘she knows she's being noticed.'

It turned out that Mr. Silver was attached to the Senate, in an advisory post. He knew more about the current where­ abouts of the Democrats than Fury. He informed them he had held a prominent position in J.F. Kennedy's election campaign, and been involved in the investigation into his death.

‘Killing,' interrupted Harold.

‘I knew the Kennedy family pretty well,' Silver boasted. ‘I stayed with them on a couple of occasions, once in Boston and another time at their place in Palm Beach. I'm not likely to forget that particular weekend . . . it could have been my last. None of us knew about it at the time, but a guy was parked outside in a car packed full of dynamite. Early on Sunday morning—we were about go off to church—Jack went out onto the balcony, followed by Jackie and the kids. But the fellow drove off. After he was caught, he said he'd changed his mind because he wasn't into harming children. He ended up in a mental hospital. When told what he'd intended to do, Rose Kennedy didn't bat an eyelid.'

‘Rose,' echoed Rose, thrilled.

‘She's a cold woman, a woman who's never showed affec­ tion to any of her children . . . it's what made Jack such a chaser of girls. He needed their attention, and sex was the quickest way he knew how to get it.'

‘She didn't have it easy,' Fury argued, ‘she had eight other kids . . . one of them retarded . . . and that bastard of a hus­ band.'

Silver agreed there'd been little sunshine in her life, Joe senior being such a hard guy, obsessed by money and power. Though bitterly opposed to the war, he'd expressed pride when his boy had volunteered to fly on bombing raids. ‘I guess,' he said, ‘that he thought it showed the Kennedys weren't yellow. But it near finished him off when Joe junior got blown up. Guilt mostly. He never forgave himself, or Roosevelt for that matter, who he accused of being manipu­ lated by a rotten bunch of Jews and Communists. I was present the day he attacked Truman, for backing what he called “that crippled son of a bitch who killed my son”. I remember the occasion because the sunlight was streaming through the windows and Joe's head was circled with a halo. He snarled that if he were Roosevelt he'd commit suicide.'

‘Hubert Humphrey made the same mistake last year,' said Fury. ‘Remember the photograph he had taken linking arms with that freak Lester Maddox . . .'

‘Humphrey loves people like an alcoholic loves booze,' remarked Harold. Though she didn't know who he was talk­ ing about, Rose thought that was quite witty.

‘Neither old Joe nor Rose shed a tear after being told that Jack had been shot,' said Silver. ‘Nor did they ask for details. But by that time old Joe's brain had gone.'

‘I wouldn't have asked either,' said Rose. ‘Best left in the dark.'

‘At least,' Fury said, ‘it was easy to nail the guy who killed Jack.'

‘It sure was lucky,' Mr. Silver acknowledged, ‘that Oswald was spotted going into a movie theatre.'

‘Even luckier,' barked Harold, ‘to have Jack Ruby standing by with a gun.'

There was a sudden silence. Rose was aware that the occu­ pants of the table, particularly Fury, had become uncomfortable. Then Philopsona, worried that her chicken wasn't being appreciated, launched into an account of how easy it was to extinguish life.

‘They approach,' she said, ‘cluck, and when seized dip down and stay mute . . . they goddamn well freeze. They know what's going to happen.'

‘Unlike JFK,' said Harold, at which Silver banged the table and proposed a toast, ‘To Robert Kennedy,' he bellowed, ‘soon to be the great leader of a great country.'

Harold didn't raise his glass.

The lunch over, Fury invited his guests to come for a ride. ‘If he suggests you break into a gallop,' Silver warned Rose, ‘just keep a tight grip on the reins. If the horse doesn't respond, slide off.'

He himself wasn't joining them, having five years before sustained a fracture of the skull after being tossed going over a gate. It had happened, he said, because he'd been brought up on a farm and been deluded into feelings of authority where animals were concerned. But it wasn't the injury that deterred him, more that he was still smarting from the med­ ical bills he'd had to pay.

‘Rose can't go,' Harold said, holding up his hand as though directing the traffic.

‘But I want to,' she protested, ‘it'll be fun.'

‘You're not insured,' he snapped.

‘Then why,' she retorted, ‘have you let me travel thousands of miles in that van?'

‘She can take Gingernuts,' said Fury. ‘She's so old she can hardly walk, let alone trot.' Outside, the fields sparkled like glass beneath a violently blue sky. It was hard to breathe. A black woman with huge bare arms harnessed three munching horses. She had a cross dangling from a string about her neck and no shoes on her feet. Rose thanked the woman profusely for helping her into the saddle. She noticed that Fury stroked the woman's thighs before mounting.

It soon became apparent that Rose's horse was indeed with­ out energy. It stopped frequently to pluck at the grass. After half an hour, by which time Harold and Fury were out of sight, it lay down, leaving Rose with her feet scraping the ground. She kicked at it, gently, but it ignored her.

Dismounting, she wandered back over the fields, amusing herself by seeing how far she could spit. Dr. Wheeler had been tops at spitting. Once, in the churchyard, he'd spat clear over three graves. She'd tried too, but her phlegm had landed in a pot of daffodils, at which he'd tossed the contaminated soil into the pine trees. Tributes to the dead, he'd said, should be treated with respect. At the time, she'd considered coming back to the cemetery on her own and moving the pot to the tunnel on the shore, to the sandy darkness where an old man had once crouched. Governments and generals, she reasoned, were always attending memorial services to those they had pushed into death. Later she'd changed her mind—it would have amounted to theft.

Entering the stable yard she saw yellow sweater hunched on the veranda steps, smoking a cigarette. At her approach he jumped to his feet and ran towards her. ‘The horse,' he shouted, ‘where is your horse?' She was surprised at how well he spoke, barely a trace of a funny accent.

‘It sat down,' she told him. ‘It'll come back, won't it? They're like dogs.'

He didn't reply, just stared at the meadow beyond, expres­ sion worried. His face was brown, though not from the sun, his hair black and curly. It was cheeky of her, but she asked if he could spare her a cigarette. ‘I'll give you one back,' she reas­ sured him. Reluctantly, he left off scanning the horizon and indicated the pack on the steps. ‘Thank you, thank you,' she cried, oozing gratitude, but he had already opened the gate and was striding off into the field.

The packet was almost full. Guiltily she removed two and, stuffing them into her pocket, scurried round the side of the house. Mr. Silver, dissolving in a pool of sunlight, was weeing through a barred gate. Philopsona sat hunched on the grass, hands covering her face. For a moment Rose thought this was to avoid the sight of private parts, but then the woman moaned loudly and beat at her eyes with clenched fists.

She was backing away when Silver called out, ‘Wait . . . nearly done.' Doing up his trousers. he said, ‘Don't go, there's things I want to know.'

She asked, ‘What's wrong with her?'

‘Nothing,' he replied, a bead of sweat bouncing from his eyebrow. Taking her arm he steered her in the direction of the house. ‘How well do you know John Fury?' he asked. ‘When did you get together?'

‘We're not together,' she corrected. ‘I hardly know him . . . we met in a forest. I'm with Harold, but we're not together either . . . not really. He's just helping me find someone.'

‘For what reason?'

‘Is Mrs Fury sick?'

‘This person you're both looking for,' demanded Silver, ‘does she live round here?'

‘Please,' she said, ‘I'm looking for a man . . . he's nothing to do with Harold, just me.'

Reaching the house, she pulled away from him and sat on the steps to light a cigarette. He stood over her, legs splayed wide, eyes searching her face. His trousers hadn't been fas­ tened properly, the top button left undone.

‘Why would Harold want to help you if you're not together?' he persisted.