A Garden of Earthly Delights (10 page)

A woman's hand prodded his side. Nancy giggled he was talking in his sleep again. Twitching, kicking.

Damn bus was bouncing on a dirt road. Must've left the highway so Carleton pretended to know this. Something hot and hungry in his gut like a ball of baby snakes. He fumbled for the whiskey. What was left of it.

It burned as it went down, and then it stopped burning.

A warm numb sensation. Baby snakes settling to sleep.

“Hon, you gonna share? Sure!”

Nancy pried the bottle from his fingers and lifted it to her mouth drinking quick and practiced wiping her mouth with the back of her hand as a man would do, and her eyes glowing warm and amber like the whiskey. You weren't supposed to drink on the bus but the driver himself sometimes drank. Some way to get through the long hours, the fuckin heat. Nancy was passing the bottle to the Texas couple behind them, these two she'd struck up a friendship with as Nancy had a way of doing, quick to make friends and quick to make enemies that was Nancy's way. Now she was acting like it was Carleton's idea to pass the whiskey to them, boastful of her man she saw as good-looking and a real man, Christ it pissed him hearing her bragging on him like he was somebody special. Stroking his upper arm, his ropey muscles like it thrilled her. “This man of mine he's been all over the map, comes from Kentucky, lived in a hotel in Cincinnati for a while, he crossed the Mississippi how many times, hon?—” and Carleton only just shrugged. He knew sometimes when she was drunk and feeling sexy she would hint to people that Carleton had hurt—her words were
hurt, hurt bad, had to hurt
— a man back in Florida, but she never spoke of this to Carleton's face, she knew she had better not.

Carleton supposed the Texas couple was wondering why he didn't turn around and be friendly with them well fuck 'em let 'em wonder: Carleton Walpole wasn't any old trained bear. Let them go to hell: he hated them. Not as bad as spics and niggers that you hated on principle, these types you hated soon as you laid eyes on them for what they were. Fuckin losers, deadbeats and assholes and drunks. And the women loud, worse than the men. Mostly everybody on the bus Carleton was feeling savage about except his kids and maybe Nancy if she didn't gab so fuckin much, like to tie a sack over her head to shut her up. His kids he would spare, though Rod-well was pissing him off with his smart-ass mouth, hee-hawing at the back of the bus with some boys, and Roosevelt was the homeliest kid you ever saw like a retard with that glaze in his eyes and a stammer if his pa looked at him crossways. Carleton took back the bottle and drank and shut his eyes to the fiery blur of the sun thinking if this busload all died in a crash it'd be no loss to the world. Except the fuckin bus was not going fast enough on this dirt road to crash hard. Turn over into a ditch? A creek? Might not be deep enough, a creek. Over the side of a bridge into the Mississippi River, that would do the trick: maybe a hundred feet deep, and a mile wide, and a fast-moving current and undertow.

Except: say the bus careened off a bridge and into the river and everybody on the bus drowned except Carleton Walpole and his family for God had spared them.

Know why I spared you, Carleton Walpole?

And he would bow his head in meekness. For he would not know.

Seek and ye shall find
was God's reply.
All the corners of the world shall ye seek and one day ye shall find.

The camp was just off the dirt road, hidden by a scrubby orchard. When they climbed out of the school bus everyone felt the ground wobble. Carleton looked suspiciously about to see what it was like. Nancy helped Roosevelt down, scolding to Clara, “He shouldn't ought to do that in his pants, old as he is. You got to teach him better, honey. You're his sister.”

Clara bit at her thumbnail. “I thought he was O.K.”

Before them the grassless space was strewn with junk. The remains of a trash fire. On both sides were shacks that had been whitewashed years ago. At the far end was a tomato field. Carleton shielded his eyes looking that way: heat waves glimmered there like gasoline fumes. “They painted these places up nice, that was nice of them,” Nancy said. She was carrying her clothes and things rolled into a soiled quilt. “What do you think, honey?”

Carleton frowned. Being called
honey
didn't always ring right with him. He grunted, “Looks all right.”

They were assigned to their cabins. Carleton never looked at the crew recruiter, who spoke in the same loud bossy way to everyone— Carleton Walpole as well as old deaf cripples who could hardly walk—and who liked to pretend that Carleton wasn't as good a man as he was. This recruiter also drove the bus to make a little more money.

“This'll suit us fine. Ain't this fine?” Nancy said.

“Somebody left some clothes for us.” Carleton kicked at a pile of soiled clothes on the floor of the cabin. Bloodstained underpants.

They were always happy on the first day. Even Carleton would feel some hope. This shanty, that the recruiter called a cabin, wasn't too bad, bigger than the previous one, and not so smelly. There were cobwebs and dead insects and more trash on the floor, but Nancy and Clara would take care of that. Carleton said nothing and let them unpack. His underarms and sides were slick with sweat. Damn crack in his ass burning-hot. He was damn thirsty but would have to wait on that, he knew. That whiskey-dryness in his throat like he'd been sleeping. Carleton tested the lightbulb over the kitchen table and it worked. That was good. He plugged in the hot plate and that worked too. With his knee he prodded the mattresses; they were all right. When he was finished he jumped down from the doorstep and stood in front of the shack with his hands on his hips.

Each of the shacks was numbered. Theirs was. Carleton stared at this figure in disgust, to think that he would have to live in a shanty with a six painted backward on it, as if he himself had been stupid enough to do that! Children were already out playing around the shacks. The shacks were propped up off the ground on concrete 6
blocks and some of them did not look very stable. Carleton walked slowly along, his hands still on his hips as if he owned everything. Back between the shacks were old cardboard boxes and washtubs. Some were turned over, others were right side up and filled with rainwater. He knew that if he went over to look he'd see long thin worms swimming gracefully in the tubs. Out in front of some of the shacks were big packing crates filled with trash. Some kids were already picking through them.

“Roosevelt, get the hell out of that crap!” Carleton said.

He cuffed the boy on the face. Roosevelt had a narrow head and light brown hair that grew out too thin, so that he looked like a little old man at times. There were hard circular things on his head, crusty rings that had come from nowhere, and two of his front teeth had been kicked out in a fight with some other kids. He shrank away from Carleton and ran off. “You stay out of other people's goddamn garbage,” Carleton said. The other children waited for him to get past. They were afraid of him.

The rest of the men were outside now, waiting. They spent their time working or drinking; when they had nothing to do, their arms were idle and uneasy. Two of them squatted down in the shade of a scrawny tree and took out a deck of cards. “Want to try it, Walpole?” one said.

“You don't have no money,” Carleton said sullenly.

“Do you?”

“I don't play for fun. You don't have no money, it's a waste of my time.”

“You got lots of money yourself ?”

The Texas man, Bert, appeared in the doorway of a shanty, stretching his arms. He had taken off his shirt. His chest was sunken and bluish white, but he looked happy, as if he'd just come home.

“C'mon play with us, Walpole,” he said.

Carleton made a contemptuous gesture. He had some money saved and maybe he could double it if he played with them, but he had come to despise their odors and stained teeth and constant, repetitious talk; they were just trash.

“I got no heart for it,” he said.

He walked by. He could hear them shuffling cards. “We don't go
out till the mornin,” someone said. Carleton did not glance around. His eyes were taken up by other things, drawn back and forth along the rows of cabins as if looking for something familiar. Some sign, some indication of promise. There were a number of sparrows and blackbirds picking at something on the ground; Carleton tried not to look at it, but saw it anyway—a small animal, rotted. It made him angry to think that the farmer who owned this camp didn't bother to bury something like that. It was dirty, it was filthy. The whole camp ought to be burned down.… And the junk from last year, last year's garbage still lying around. Carleton spat in disgust.

He had left the packed-down area between the shacks and was looking now out over a field. The tomato plants were pale green, dusty, healthy. Carleton could see in his mind's eye the dull red tomatoes, rising and falling as if in a dream, and his own hands reaching out to snatch them. Out and down and around and back, in a mechanical, graceful, endless movement. Out and down, tugging at the stem, and then around and back, putting the tomato gently in the container—then inching ahead on his heels to get the next plant. And on and on. He would squat for a while and then kneel; the women and kids and old men knelt right away.

It used to be that he would dream about picking after he had worked all day, but now he dreamed about it even before he worked. And the dreams were not just night dreams either, but ghostly visions that could come to him in the brightest sunlight.

“Son of a bitch,” Carleton muttered.

He turned and shaded his eyes to look back over the camp. He saw now that it was the same camp they'd been coming to for years. Even the smells were the same. Off to the right, down an incline, were two outhouses as always; it would smell violently down there, but the smell would be no surprise. That was the safe thing about these camps: there were no surprises. Carleton took a deep breath and looked out over the campsite, where the sun poured brilliantly down on the clutter: rain-rotted posts with drooping gray clotheslines, abandoned shoes, bottles of glinting red and green, tin cans all washed clean by the rain of many months, boards, rags, broken glass, wire, parts of barrels, and, at either side of the camp, rusted iron pipes rising up out of the ground and topped by faucets.
A slow constant drip fell from the faucets and had eaten holes into the ground. Alongside one of the shanties was an old stove; maybe it was for everyone's use.

It was another bad year, Carleton thought, but it would get better. Things had been bad for a long time for everyone—they talked about rich men killing themselves, even. The kind of work Carleton did was sure, steady work. Up on high levels you can open a newspaper or get a telephone call and find out you're finished, and then you have to kill yourself; with people like Carleton it was possible just to laugh. It was the times themselves that were bad, Carleton thought. It was keeping him down, sitting on him. But he would never give up. When things began to get better—it would start up in New York City—then men who were smarter than others could work themselves up again, swimming upward through all the mobs of stupid, stinking people like the ones Carleton had to work with. They were just trash, the men squatting there and tossing cards around, and the fat women hanging in doorways and grinning out at one another: Well, we come a long way! Ain't we come a long way? Some of these people had been doing fieldwork now for twenty, thirty, even forty years, and none of them had any more to show for it than the clothes they were wearing and the junk they'd brought rolled up in quilts.… This was true of Carleton but he had a family to keep going; if he didn't have that family he would have saved lots of money by now.

He did have about ten dollars, wadded up carefully in his pocket. Nancy knew nothing about it and what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her. It struck Carleton sometimes that he should spend this money on Clara—get her a little plastic purse or a necklace. He did not feel that way about his other children. Mike had run off a while ago and nobody missed him; he'd been trouble at the end. Carleton had had to give it to him so hard that the kid's mouth had welled with blood, he'd almost choked on his own blood, and that taught him who was boss. Sharleen was back in Florida, married. She had married a boy who worked at a garage; she liked to brag he had a steady job and he could work indoors. But she never brought the boy home for Carleton to see. So he had said to her: “You're a whore, just like your mother.” He hadn't meant anything by that.
He hadn't thought about what it meant. But after that he had never seen Sharleen again. He was glad to get rid of her and her darting nervous eyes.

The fear he saw in his children's faces did not make him like them. Even Clara showed it at times. That wincing, cautious look only provoked him and made him careless with his blows; Nancy had enough sense to know that. What Carleton liked was peace, quiet, calm, the way Clara would crawl up on his knee and tell him about school or her girlfriends or things she thought were funny, or the way Nancy embraced him and stroked his back.

Carleton was hungry. He headed back toward the cabin. The square now was filled with children and women airing out quilts and blankets on the clotheslines. Bert's wife was flapping something out the doorway. She had a beet-red face and surprised, tufted hair. “Nice day!” she said. Carleton nodded. Two boys ran shrieking in front of him. He saw Clara and Rosalie by the men who were playing cards. Clara ran out to him and took his hand. He thought how strange that was: a girl runs out and takes his hand, he is her father, she is his daughter. He felt warm. “Rosalie's pa won somethin an's goin to give it to her!” Clara cried. Carleton let himself be led over reluctantly to the cardplayers. Bert was making whopping noises as he tossed down his cards. He chortled, he hooted, he tapped another man's chest with the back of his fingers, daintily. Carleton's shadow fell on his head and shoulders and he grinned up at Carleton. Behind Bert were the rest of his kids. The girl's hair was a frantic red-brown, like her father's, and she had her father's friendly, amazed, mocking eyes. “Here y'are, honey,” he said. He dropped some things in her opened hands. Everyone laughed at her excitement.