Making Waves (6 page)

“Tim! I've got it—I've got a name for my shop!”

“Okay. From the look on your face, it must be a good one.”

“I'm going to name it
Making Waves
.”

Tim looked at me, puzzled, his face dark. Then his expression cleared, and he laughed out loud. It'd been a long time since I'd heard him laugh like that.

“Making Waves, huh?—I love it!”

I jumped up from the swing and grabbed both his hands in mine and began to pull him to his feet.

“Me and my shop's going to be making waves in Zion County like nobody's ever seen before! Now, come on, Mr. Tim Sullivan. Let's go eat that fish—I'm about to starve to death.”

And I was, too. I felt like I could eat anything now because I knew that Making Waves was going to be a new beginning for us, that we'd be able to put the past behind us. And I knew that Tim was finally, finally going to be okay.

I hung up the phone after Aunt Della's call and stood in my bedroom shaking, feeling low-down, like the jerk-off I am. Lately I'd been getting off on feeling like the lowest of life forms. An amoeba. Or Prufrock's pair of claws—not even a whole creature, scuttling across the very bottom of the ocean.

“So what else is new, Dupree—when haven't you felt like a lowlife?” I'd also been talking to myself lately, a sure sign of my advanced stage of insanity. Getting worse instead of better, in spite of what my shrink said. What did he know anyway? Only what I told him. And I was very careful about that, doling out bits and pieces, enough to satisfy him, get him off my back. Or give me some more pills, whatever.

Of course my looniness was always worse after talking with Aunt Della, as the shrink loved to point out, scribbling like hell on his notepad. Sometimes I'd go almost two weeks without hearing from Aunt Della, and during that time I'd be functioning pretty normally, going to classes, working, boozing it up, screwing around, my usual routine. Then I'd get to missing her so much that I'd call her, or she'd call me, and I'd feel shitty all over again.

But this time—it was really bad. She'd fallen again, gotten so she couldn't get around without a walker. She had sounded so frail, so damn
old
suddenly. I couldn't picture that; she'd always been so energetic, so youthful. It never fails to amaze me how incredibly bad life sucks. I swear I never want to get old. I'd much rather be six feet under, any day, than be old in this society where old folks are treated like lepers, stuck away in modern leper colonies called nursing homes. Lots of things are worse than croaking. Lots and lots of things.

I put the phone back by my bed and walked into the kitchen area. Getting a beer out of the fridge, I popped the top and noticed that as usual, the kitchen was a disaster area, dirty dishes and crap piled everywhere. I'd have to clean the place tomorrow since the sublease was almost up and I had to clear out, get back into the dorm.

I hated living in the dorm but sweet Charlotte wouldn't pay for anything else. I guess she fantasizes that if I'm in the dorm, I can't get into as much trouble—though she pretends she only wants me to truly experience college life. Whatever. I gave up trying to figure that woman out a long time ago.

The beer was good, icy, icy cold, a contrast to the hot, hot apartment, and I plopped down in the only chair available. I wanted to get Aunt Della's call off my mind. Guess I'd have to drink the whole six-pack before that happened.

Why did she have to beg me to come home? Looks like after all this time she of all people would finally get the message. Women. I swear, no matter what age they are, they're nothing but a pain in the ass.

Aunt Della knew better than anybody that I had no intention of setting foot in Hicksville again. But she knew me so well, she must have heard something in my voice lately that made her start in on me. She hadn't mentioned my returning for ages; now all of a sudden, here she goes again.

I guess the woman
does
know me better than anyone. She knew exactly how I felt right after the accident, when I first came here, and she never mentioned me coming home then. Not that I could have even if I'd wanted to, of course. Just the thought of returning to Clarksville made me wake up with cold sweats and the pukes. Even the shrink knew better than to try to make me go back then.

But now, two years later, I'd begun to have some strange feelings about the old homeplace. I almost wanted to see it again. And of course I wanted to see Aunt Della—she came to see me a couple of times the first year and it almost killed her, so she'd not been able to come here again.

All this nostalgia shit started when I got fired a few days ago for chasing Cat all over the streets of New Orleans. The memory of it makes me laugh at myself now. Of all the things I've done, few things have made me feel like such a fool—which inevitably makes me long to be back in my hometown, where I was king of fools.

It
was
a weird experience, though. There I was, busing tables at Antoine's Courtyard like I did every afternoon. I'd just cleared off a particularly crappy table, full of beer bottles and soggy cigarette butts—one of those shitty messes I hate. And I swear and be damned, I saw Cat Jordan, plain as day, strolling down St. Ann's Street.

Totally ignoring the fools sitting around nursing happy-hour specials, I yelled loud as a country bumpkin raised in Alabama: “CAT!” And she didn't hear me because right in the middle of the street was a monkey and an organ grinder—an
organ grinder
, of all the damn things, out there noisily grinding his organ, a crowd of gaping tourists around. So I yelled again, “
CAT JORDAN!
”

This time everybody in the place stopped drinking long enough to really look at me, and I saw Jacque and the other waiters nudge each other. They all thought I should be committed anyway. So there was Cat, walking away from me, almost to Bourbon Street, not hearing me because of that damn fool monkey music—all like something out of a Woody Allen movie. I couldn't stand it; I'd longed for her for two years, no contact—all my letters returned unopened, and now she was walking away from me. So what did I do?—I hauled ass after her, actually jumping over a table and knocking down two chairs.

There I went, running like a fool in my cute French-waiter outfit, apron and all. I lost her soon as I got into the crowd of drunken idiots on Bourbon Street, of course. But then I spotted her again, long dark hair flowing out behind her, bare slim legs striding confidently along, crossing Bourbon and heading down Royal.

“CAT! CAT—WAIT!” I yelled like a madman as I ran after her, bumping into tourists and pushing aside tables and chairs from the zillion outdoor cafes I encountered on the way. Of course folks stared at me like the fool I was, a strange sight in a city of strange sights. As I ran across Chartres, I heard a cop yell, “Hey you!” but I continued on, determined, until I finally caught up with her in Jackson Square. I grabbed her from behind and stood huffing and puffing like a pervert as I turned her around to face me.

And of course it wasn't Cat after all. Damn woman was forty if she was a day, good-looking all right, but definitely not Cat. She thought the whole thing was funny as hell, but my boss didn't. I didn't care; the jerk-off paid me less than minimum wage all summer, promising to promote me to waiter. So I was glad to get out of that situation.

But having free time since then, plus seeing Cat, that got me thinking about Clarksville all over again. Okay, truth time. I had not thought of anything else. Obsessive behavior, said my shrink. Get some healthy outside interests. Go to your group meetings, like you're supposed to. Exercise. I popped the top on another beer, the only exercise I got lately. Yeah, buddy. Sure. Like all that crap was going to help me, a certified psycho.

Actually there
was
one other time, before the great street chase, that I got like this, right at the end of the semester last May. But I bounced back from that, got the apartment and the job, and got my mind on other things. Hey, maybe the shrink had a point after all.

Guess I had spring fever then or something, but I couldn't concentrate on my classes, damn near flunked out. It was
really
weird, gave the shrink a tizzy. Suddenly every classroom I went into became a class back in Clarksville High, and I'd lose touch with reality. Actually, confusing Tulane and old CHS is more than weird; it's ludicrous.

But there I would be, sitting and taking notes in a world history class, old fart professor going on and on about a revolution somewhere in some godforsaken country no one gives a shit about. I would lose contact with the present, the room would fade out, and suddenly I'd find myself back in Clarksville High, dizzy and disoriented. The eminent Dr. Reinhold Dietrich's face would blur and become the blobby face of Old Man Holman in my eleventh-grade American history class. The whole class was a hoot, one of the few I really enjoyed because we gave old Holman pure hell.

Holman would have bored us shitless reading aloud from the textbook every class but he was such an idiot he couldn't pronounce the words right, entertaining us with his attempts.
Laissez-faire
became
lassie fairy
,
Shiloh
,
Shill-oh
, and Cat and I screamed with laughter.

Of course we were the only ones who knew the difference. Tater Dyer slept the whole time, once so sound asleep that he fell out of his desk and busted his fat ass, everybody laughing like hyenas as he bled like a stuck pig. I tormented old Holman relentlessly, putting on a Cajun accent, pretending I couldn't speak English, mocking his every word. Cat sat in front of me and I'd goose her and feel her up, so she'd be cussing and slapping hell out of me until Holman'd have enough and send us to the principal, who'd sigh and roll his eyes when he saw us coming again.

We cheated like politicians, too. During the exam every Friday we'd be passing our papers back and forth right under Holman's big hairy nose, which he would often pick in front of us, then carefully inspect the loot. Once I started a special fund to send him to college, putting posters all over the school, claiming he'd never been. God, poor old fellow must have hated my guts!

The only serious student in there was Tim, and he'd shut us out completely, lost in the unbelievably boring details of the War Between the States and Reconstruction. We threw spitballs at him and tried to distract him, but he ignored us, asking Holman questions the idiot couldn't come close to answering. Holman always put Tim off by changing the subject, inquiring instead about an upcoming game. Which pissed me off, folks treating Tim like a dumb jock, and I'd end up looking up the answers for him and despising Holman even more.

I got over that sicko classroom fixation though, once the semester was over. And I'd been doing pretty good until the famous chase and now the call from Aunt Della. If only she hadn't begged me to come home again. 'Course she had a point—two years is a long time, and she said it was time I put that behind me and got on with my life, what everybody else told me, too. Only problem was, they didn't tell me
how
the hell to do it.

The beer and the heat got to me eventually and I fell asleep in the chair, clutching my empty beer can like a teddy bear. When I woke up, it was dark and the damn phone was ringing like hell. I didn't know how long it'd been ringing; I was so disoriented I didn't know where I was. Finally I stumbled back into the bedroom and fumbled around until I found it.

“Taylor? Taylor, baby, is that you?” Aunt Della again. Except this time she was crying.

“Aunt Della, what's wrong? You okay?”

My voice was sleep-slurred, but hers … oh God, her voice killed me. I loved her rich Southern drawl, conjuring up magnolias and mint juleps. But now—now it was so feeble and so old-sounding.

“Taylor, Mary Frances just called me—Maudie died,” she cried.

For a minute I couldn't think, couldn't connect a name with a person. Then I saw her, plain as day, my third-grade teacher, Miss Maudie Ferguson. One of Aunt Della's cronies. They'd been raised together in Clarksville and were the best of friends. Poor Aunt Della.

“Oh, man. I'm so sorry, Aunt Della. What happened to her?”

“Well, she hasn't been right since she fell and had her hip replaced. She just never bounced back. Then she had a stroke—” Her voice broke again. “Oh, honey! I hate it so bad, her dying like that, off from home in that awful place. Though I know she is with Jesus now.”

Aunt Della was a real Jesus freak, always had been. But I kind of liked her Jesus. The way she talked to him was cool, even to a sinner like me. Sometimes I wished I could have such a simple faith. Or any faith at all.

“Maybe it wasn't so awful, Aunt Della. I'll bet she was well taken care of.”

There I went, bullshitting about something I knew nothing about, trying to make her feel better. But she was having none of it.

“
Huh!
That's what breaks my heart. Since I'd gotten to where I couldn't go see her, nobody else did, with Sarah Jean living so far away. Maudie went down in a hurry after I quit coming. It just breaks my heart.”

I couldn't resist stupid platitudes, still trying to cheer her up. “At least she had you, Aunt Della.”

That turned out to be the wrong thing to say, too, because it hung in the air between us.
Unlike you
, it said,
unlike you who has nobody but a disappointing jerk like me
.