Second Skin (4 page)

Then silence. Except for the shot glasses. Except for the tin trays. Except for the moaning sailor and the bay plunging and crashing somewhere in the night. Except for the torch song of our homeless millions. I slumped. Sonny shook his head, threw out suddenly a long fierce burnt-up hand and pure white dapper cuff:“Oh, that unfaithful stuff is the devil! Pure devil!”

The shaft goes to the breast, love shatters, whole troop trains of love are destroyed, the hero is the trumpet player twisted into a lone embrace with his sexless but mellow horn, the goodbys are near and I hear Cassandra whispering and I see the color in her eyes: “There aren’t any husbands left in the world. Are there. Skipper?”

But Sonny answered. Sonny who took a shower in our cheap hotel. Sonny whose uniform was pressed dark blue and hard and crisp in a steaming mangle: “Dead or unfaithful. Miss Cassandra, that’s a fact. Damn all them unfaithful lovers!”

Bereft. Cool. Grieved. Triumphant. The frozen bacchanal, the withered leaf. Taps in the desert. Taps at sea. Small woman, poor faithful friend, crying child—Pixie had begun to cry—and I the lawful guardian determined but still distressed and past fifty, nose packed with carbonated water, head fuming with rum, all of us wrecked together in a Chinatown café and waiting for the rising tide, another dark whim of the sea. But still I had my love of the future, my wounded pride.

“I think I told you. Sonny, that I’m taking Cassandra and Pixie to a gentle island. You won’t need to worry about them.”

“That’s it, that’s it. Skipper. These two little ladies are in good hands. Well now. Well, I understand. And I got a gentle island too if I can just find her. Wanders around some, true enough, but she sure is gentle and she sure just about accommodates an old black castaway like me. Oh, just let Sonny crawl up on that gentle shore!” He was nodding, smiling, with his long smoky five-gaited fingers was trying to turn Pixie on his lap, fondling, probing the fingers, gently feeling for the source of her tiny noise, and all the while kept the two great cold black
lenses of his pink and white shell-rimmed sunglasses fixed in my direction. Nodding, at last beginning to croon through his nose —tight lips, menacing cheekbones—holding Pixie and shining all his black love into my heart.

But Pixie was crying. She was crying her loudest with tiny pug nose wrinkled, wet, tiny eyes bright and angry, tiny hands in fists, tiny arms swinging in spasms and doll’s dress bunched around her middle, and her cry was only the faint turbulence of an insect trapped in a bottle. Amusing. Pitiful. A little bottle of grief like her mother.

“Pixie don’t like this separation stuff,” crooning, chucking her under the chin with the tip of his long black finger while Cassandra and I leaned forward to see, to hear: “Pixie don’t approve of our family busting up this way.” And she bent her rubbery knees, kicked, striking on the table the little dirty white calfskin shoe that was untied, unkempt, forlorn, and then she was suddenly quiet, appeased, and smiled at Sonny and caught his finger as if to bite it to the bone with all the delight and savagery of the tiny child spoiled and underfed—rancid baby bottles, thin chocolate bars—through all her dreary abandoned days in wartime transit.

“That’s the sign, folks! Pixie’s ready! Time to go!”

I sat still, I flung my face into the smell of the empty glass, Cassandra took up her purse. And then we were in single file and pushing through the crowd of sailors. First Sonny—flight bag, paper bag stuffed with chicken salad sandwiches. Pixie riding high on his shoulders and thumping his cap—and then Cassandra—small, proud, prisoner of lost love, mother of child, barelegged and desirable, in her own way widowed and silvery and slender, walking now through anchors and booze and the anonymous cross-country passion of the Infantry March—and then in the rear myself—more tired than ever, bald, confused, two hundred pounds of old junior-grade naval officer and close to tears. This our dismal procession with Sonny leading the way. “Step aside there, fella, you don’t want to tangle with the Chief!” Pixie was blowing kisses to the sailors; Cassandra was wearing her invisible chains, invisible flowers; and I refused to see, to
acknowledge the scampering white-slavers, refused to say goodby to all those little Chinese waiters. Then out the door.

Long steel body like a submarine. Giant black recapped tires. Driver—another mean nigger, as Sonny would say—already stiff and silhouetted behind his sheet of glass and wearing his dark slant-eyed driving glasses and his little Air Force style cap crushed and peaked, ready and waiting to take her up, to start the mission. Concrete pillars, iron doors, dollies heaped high with duffel bags, no lights, crowds of sailors, odor of low-lying diesel smoke, little dry blisters of chewing gum under our feet, and noise. Noise of sailors banging on the sides of the bus and singing and vomiting and crying out to their dead buddies. The terminal. Our point of departure. And the tickets were flying and the SP’s were ferocious ghosts, leaping in pairs on victim, lunging slyly, swinging hard with the little wet oaken clubs.

So at last we were packed together in rude and shameless embrace and at last we were shouting: “You go on now. Skipper,” tall dancer, black cannon mouth, blow in the ribs, weighing me down with child, provisions, canvas bag, “you go on and get you a nice seat. Take your ladies on off to your island—I’m going to be on mine—no unfaithful lovers on my island. Skipper, just me, now you keeps your island the same. Good-by now, and you remember, Skipper, I’m going to lie me down on my island and just look at them pictures and think of you and Pixie and Miss Cassandra. So long!”

“Sonny!” Crying aloud, crying, bumping against him, bumping and trying to shift the wretched child out of our way, then falling against his tall black twisting form—glint of the buttons, bones of a lean steer, glimpse of a fading smile—then throwing myself and managing at last to kiss the two dark cheeks, warm, oddly soft and dry, affectionate long panther paws, kissing and calling out to him: “Good-by, Sonny.
Bon voyage!”
Then we were flowing on a rough stream toward the bus and he was gone. Poor Sonny.

But Sonny was not gone at all. Not yet. The three of us were carried backwards and up into the great dark steel cylinder of our reckless ten-wheeled transport. We joined that monstrous riot for seats—one hundred and three men, a woman, a child, swallowed up for numerous sins and petty crimes into this terrible nonstop belly of ours and fighting hopelessly for breath, for privacy—and were lucky enough to snatch two seats together and to crouch down with flight bag and sandwiches between our legs and my hat askew and the skirt of Cassandra’s frock crumpled above her knees. They were slim knees, bare, slender, glistening, disregarded. It was dark, the aisle was heaped high with white duffel bags. And did each of those sagging white canvas shapes represent the dead body of a bantamweight buddy saved from the sea and stowed away in canvas, at last to be lugged or flung aboard Interstate Carrier Number twenty-seven, bound nonstop for the great navy yard of the east? I looked for only a moment at Cassandra’s knees and then quickly lifted my granddaughter to the pitch-dark window at my side. Pixie was crying again—insect going berserk in his glass, little fists socking
the window—and the sailors were flashing their Zippo lighters and slowly, slowly, we were beginning to move. And then three figures struggled out of the flat gray planes and cumbersome shadows of the concrete, and dashed toward the front of the bus. The tall drunk bosun’s mate was waving, Sonny was waving, and between them the moaning sailor was rolling his head, dragging his feet. The tubular door sprang halfway open and, “That’s it,” helpful, officious, out of breath, “get these fellas inside there … that’s it! ” And then Sonny was alone in the dark and we were backing slowly from the terminal in a wake of oil and compressed air. I pressed my face to the window, against the glass, too tired to make a farewell sign with my hand.

Off to one side, puffing, straightening his coat, Sonny continued to follow us. I saw his imperious arm, saw his slow imperious stride and the long fingers pointing instructions to the driver. Sonny held up his flat hand and we stopped; Sonny began to swing his arm and we started forward, turned, paced his tall backward-stepping shadow—anxious glance over his shoulder, summoning gesture of the long thin arm and flashing cuff—and then he stood aside and waved us on. I smiled, lost him, but even in the blast of the diesel heard what he must have communicated to his mean black brother in the cockpit: “You’re OK. Now just keep this thing on the road. …”

Then I leaned back heavily and, pain or no pain, shifted Pixie so that she stretched herself flat on my chest and slept immediately. I lay there watching the stars and feeling my hunger grow. The paper bag was between Cassandra’s feet, not mine, yet I could see the crushed bulk of it, the waxed paper and wilted lettuce, the stubby wet slices of white meat Sonny had prepared for us on a wobbling card table squeezed into the dirty porcelain lavatory of our cheap hotel. I could taste the white bread—no crusts—I could taste the black market mayonnaise. How many miles behind us now? Five? Ten? The bus was accelerating, was slowly filling with the smell of whisky—thick nectar of lonely travelers—and filled with the sounds of the ukelele, the tuneless instrument of the American fleet, and in her sleep Pixie was sucking her fingers and overhead the stars were awash in the
empty black fields of the night. I thought of empty dry docks, empty doorways, empty hotels, empty military camps, thought of him fixing the sandwiches while we slept—pepper, salt, tin spoon and knife— saw him drinking a can of beer on the fantail of the
Starfish
on a humid and windless night. I saw him prostrate on his island of brown flesh, heard the first sounds of returning love.

“Cassandra? Hungry, Cassandra?”

He had diced celery into cubes, had cut olives into tiny green half-moons, had used pimento. Even red pimento. The moonlight came through the window in a steady thin slipstream and in it Cassandra’s face was a small luminous profile on a silver coin, the coin unearthed happily from an old ruin and the face expressionless, fixed, the wasted impression of some little long-forgotten queen. I looked at her, as large as I was I wriggled, settled myself still deeper into the journey—oh, the luxury of going limp! —and allowed my broad white knees to fall apart, to droop in their infinite sag, allowed my right arm, the arm that was flung across sleeping Pixie, to grow numb. I was an old child of the moon and lay sprawled on the night, musing and half-exposed in the suspended and public posture of all those night travelers who are without beds, those who sleep on public benches or curl into the corners of out-of-date railway coaches, all those who dream their uncovered dreams and try to sleep on their hands. Suspended. Awake and prone in my seat next to the window, all my body fat, still, spread solid in the curvature of my Greyhound seat. And yet in my back, elbows, neck, calves, buttocks, I felt the very motion of our adventure, the tremors of our crosscountry speed. And I felt my hunger, the stomach hunger of the traveling child.

“A little picnic for the two of us, Cassandra?”

She moved—my daughter, my museum piece—and hoisted the sack onto her lap and opened it, the brown paper stained with the mysterious dark oil stains of mayonnaise and tearing, disintegrating beneath her tiny white efficient fingers. Brisk fingers, mushy brown paper sack, food for the journey. She unwrapped a sandwich, for a moment posed with it—delicate woman,
ghostly morsel of white bread and meat—then put it into my free hand which was outstretched and waiting. The bread was cold, moist, crushed thin with the imprint of dear Sonny’s palm; the lettuce was a wrinkled leaf of soft green skin, the bits of pimento were little gouts of jellied blood, the chicken was smooth, white, curved to the missing bone. I tasted it, sandwich smeared with moonlight, nibbled one wet edge—sweet art of the mess boy-then shoved the whole thing into my dry and smiling mouth and lay there chewing up Sonny’s lifetime, swallowing, licking my fingers.

My daughter was safe beside me, Pixie was sleeping on, dreaming the little pink dreams of her spoiled life, my mouth was full, the sailor was moaning. And now the distance threw out the first white skirts of a desert, a patch of poisoned water and a few black rails of abandoned track. I saw the salt mounds, the winding gulch, far off a town—mere sprinkling of dirty mica chips in the desert—and in the pleasure of this destitute world I was eager to see, eager to eat, and reached for another sandwich, stuffed it in. For Sonny.

But then I noticed her folded hands, her silent throat, the sack near empty on her lap, and I stopped in mid-mouthful, paused, swallowed it all down in a spasm: “Cassandra? No appetite, Cassandra?”

She did not answer. She did not even nod. And yet her face was turned my way, her knees tight, elbows tight, on one side not to be touched by thigh of sprawling father, on the other not to be touched by the stenciled name of the seaman whose duffel bag stood as tall as her shoulder and threatened her with reprehensible lumps and concealed designs, and in the thrust and balance of that expression, the minted little lips and nose, the bright nested eye, she made herself clear enough. No appetite. No sensation in a dry stomach. No desire. No orchids sweet enough to taste. Not the sort of woman to eat sandwiches on a bus. At least not the sort of woman who would eat in the dark. Not any more.

But I was alarmed and I persisted: “Join me, Cassandra. Please. Just a bite?”

She waited. Then I heard the firmness of the dreaming voice, the breath control of the determined heart: “My life has been a long blind date with sad unfortunate boys in uniform. With high school boys in uniform. With Fernandez. With you. A long blind date in Schrafft’s. A blind date and chicken salad sandwiches in Schrafft’s. With little black sweet pickles, Skipper. Horrible sweet pickles. Your sandwiches,” the whisper dying out for emphasis, secret, explanatory, defensive, then rising again in the hush of her greatest declamatory effort, “your sandwiches make me think of Gertrude. And Gertrude’s dark glasses. And strawberry ice cream sodas. And Gertrude’s gin. I can’t eat them, Skipper. I can’t. You see,” now leaning her head back and away, small and serpentine in the moonlight, and watching me with her wary and injured eyes, “nothing comes of a blind date, Skipper. Nothing at all. And,” moving her naked fingers, crushing the wax paper into a soft luminous ball, “this is my last blind date. A last blind date for Pixie and me. I know you won’t jilt us, Skipper. I know you’ll be kind.”

I wriggled. I blushed. I took the sandwich. I heard the catgut notes of the ukelele—vision of French letters floating downstream in the moonlight—I heard the black turbine roaring of our diesel engine, beyond this metal and glass heard the high wind filled with thistle and the flat shoe leather bodies of dead prairie rodents. And I was wedged into the night, wedged firmly in my cheerful embarrassment, and chewing, frowning, hoping to keep her feathery voice alive.

Our picnic, our predawn hours together on this speeding bus, our cramped but intricate positions together at the start of this our journey between two distant cemeteries, the nearly physical glow that begins to warm the darkest hour at the end of the night watch—when sleep is only a bright immensity put off as long as possible and a man is filled with a greedy slack desire to recall even his most painful memories—in all the seductive shabbiness of the moment I felt that I knew myself, heart and stomach, as peaceful father of my own beautiful and unpredictable child, and that the disheveled traveler was safe, that both of us were safe. We too would have our candy bars when the sun
rose. Sonny had provided the sandwiches but I myself had thought of the candy bars, had slipped them secretly into the flight bag with Cassandra’s stockings and Pixie’s little fluffy pinafore. We too would have our arrival and departure, our radio broadcast of victory and defeat. In the darkness the driver sounded his horn—triple-toned trumpet, inane orchestrated warning to weak-kneed straying cows and sleeping towns—and my lips rolled into the loose shape of a thoughtless murmur: “Happy, Cassandra?”

“I’m sleepy, Skipper. I would like to go to sleep. Will you try?”

I chuckled. And she smoothed down her frock, brushed the empty paper bag to the floor, pressed her hands together, palms and fingers straight and touching as the child prays, and without glancing at me lay her cheek on her clasped hands and shut her eyes. As if she had toileted, donned her negligee, turned with her face averted and drawn the shade. Modest Cassandra. While I chuckled again, grimaced, rolled my head back to the window, grunted under the weight of Pixie—bad dreams, little pig sounds —then sighed and swung away and dropped to my army of desperate visions that leapt about in the darkness. But safe. Sleeping. Outward bound.

But wasn’t Cassandra still my teen-age bomb? Wasn’t she? Even though she was a war bride, a mother, a young responsible woman of twenty-five? At least I thought so when at last I awoke to the desert sunburst and a giant sea-green grandfather cactus stabbed to death by its own needles and to the sight of Cassandra begging Pixie to drink down a little more of the canned milk two daysold now and pellucid. And wasn’t this precisely what I loved? That the young-old figure of my Cassandra—sweet queenly head on an old coin, yet flesh and blood—did in fact conceal the rounded high-stepping baby fat and spangles and shoulder-length hair and dimples of the beautiful and wised-up drum majorette, that little bomb who is all hot dogs and Egyptian beads? Wasn’t this also my Cassandra? I thought so and for the rest of the day the emotions and problems of this intensive fantasy saved me from the oppressive desert with its raw and bleeding
buttes and its panorama of pastel colors as outrageous and myriad as the colors that flashed in the suburban kitchen of some gold-star mother. Saved me too from our acrobatic Pixie who at lunchtime added smears, little doll-finger tracks and blunt smudges of Nestlé’s chocolate to my white naval breast already so crumpled and so badly stained. Smelling the chocolate, glancing at the unshapely humps and amputated spines, thorns, of miles of crippled cacti, I only smiled and told myself that the flesh of the cheerleader was still embedded in the flesh of Pixie’s mother and so soothed myself with various new visions of this double anatomy, this schizophrenic flesh. And toward sundown-more chocolate, more smearing, end of a hot and untalkative and disagreeable day—when I was squinting between my fingers at the last purple upheaval of the pastel riot, I struggled a moment—it was a sudden cold sickening speculation—with the question of which was the greater threat to her life, the recklessness of the teen-age bomb or the demure determination of the green-eyed and diamond-brained young matron who was silvery, small, lovable with bare legs and coronet? It was too soon for me to know. But I would love them both, scrutinize them both, then at the right moment fling myself in the way of the ascendant and destructive image. I was still scowling and loving her, suspecting her, when the desert fireworks suddenly ended and the second night came sweeping up like a dark velvet wind in our faces.

“And we don’t even have sandwiches tonight, Cassandra. Not one.”

I felt the child’s tiny knee in my groin—determined and unerring step—I felt her any hand return again and again to tantalize and wound itself against my unwashed cheek, absently I picked at the chocolate that had dried like blood on the old sailcloth or cotton or white drill of my uniform. And finding a plugged-up nipple secreted like a rubber talisman or ill omen in my pocket; watching Cassandra stuff a pair of Pixie’s underpants into the flight bag; discovering that between my two white shoes there was another, the foot and naked ankle and scuffed black shoe of some long-legged sailor who had stretched himself
out at last—in orgasm? in extreme discomfort?—and seeing Cassandra’s face dead white and realizing that finally she had scraped the bottom of the cardboard face powder box which I had saved along with her stockings: all of it reminded me of the waxworks museum we had visited with Sonny, reminded me of a statue of Popeye the Sailor, naked except for his cap and pipe, which we had assumed to be molded of rubber until we read the caption and learned that it was made of eight pounds and five different brands of chewed-up chewing gum, and reminded me too that I could fail and that the teen-age bomb could kill the queen or the queen the bomb. The beginnings of a hot and hungry night.