The Condor Passes Read online

  Even the motor was running. That was damned efficient of Michael. Stanley chuckled briefly: he did have a nigger hotel down there in the garage, all his friends and relatives came to stay with him.

  As Stanley slipped into the driver’s seat, he caught sight of Elizabeth. That cute round little body covered by a black uniform and a tiny starched apron—should have made her look discreet and only made her look more sexy. “I like her,” the Old Man said once, “good-looking girl.” And didn’t the Old Man screw her with his eyes, Stanley thought, didn’t he just. …

  The Old Man traveled easily and well, napping between puffs of his cigar, until the wheels touched down gently on the Collinsville runway.

  Mr. Robert’s helicopter was in the hangar here, all ready to go, but the Old Man would have nothing to do with it. He wanted to go by boat. So by boat it was.

  Miss Margaret disliked all boats so she went on by car, leaving the Old Man, Stanley, and Miss Hollisher at the Yacht Club. Mr. Robert was waiting; he put the Old Man aboard himself, in his special chair in a sheltered spot. The blowers were already on. Their steady dull hum floated across the little water sounds, the lapping sounds on hull and piling. On all sides boats were neatly moored along a concrete walk, long lines of parallel hulls, like pups to a nursing bitch. Nothing moved. The fishermen had gone out earlier, the pleasure sailors had not yet come. The harbor was crowded and lonely at once.

  The Old Man looked about, feeling the day for the first time. He turned his head slowly and carefully as if he were afraid it might fall off, the way a seed pod leaves the stem. He stared across the silent harbor, his old eyes not even squinting in the glare. His neck relaxed and settled more squarely on his shoulders. He didn’t say anything, but he nodded—barely.

  The blowers stopped, the engines started. Mr. Robert climbed to the flying bridge, pulling sunglasses from his pocket as he went.

  Stanley released the mooring lines; the fifty-odd feet of black hull eased out into the harbor, swung about, and headed for the passage between the stone jetties, and the open bay beyond.

  The bow slipped smoothly through the still water, screws turning very gently, scarcely leaving a wake behind. Boats in their slips barely lifted and fell as they passed. The sun was beginning to penetrate the high band of heat haze to the east, and it swam in the sky, round and yolk-colored.

  WITHIN TEN minutes the Old Man was dozing again.

  Settled in her deck chair, Miss Hollisher whispered to Stanley: “Trip is too much for him these days.”

  Stanley whispered back: “But it sure is nice for us.”

  They left the marshy upper bay, the saw grass and the alligator reed; under the hull they felt the lift of the open Gulf. The land ended so gradually, Stanley thought, that you couldn’t at any one time say: This is the boundary.

  Stanley mocked himself silently: Why do I have to be so sure all the time? Like looking at a map and saying: I am right here and right now. I got no business worrying about where I am.

  The Old Man dozed, hand on each side of his chair, old bony yellow hands, like birds’ claws, dangling, silent and curled.

  Birds, Stanley thought. Everything came out birds. … Take the name of the boat, now—the Condor. It was everywhere you looked. In gold across the wide stern, framed by heavy glistening scrolls. On the life rings by the cabin door. On the china, on the glasses, on the silverware. Even the sheets and the towels. Big black bird, flying.

  Stanley yawned. And thought about Vera. She’d be rattling around their house, straightening the towels on the bathroom racks—she was very particular about towels.

  Miss Hollisher said: “I hope Percy makes the trip all right.”

  “He will.”

  “He was my mother’s cat.”

  “You told me,” Stanley said patiently.

  “He is such good company, Stanley. You just can’t imagine.”

  Stanley said: “Yes, I can.”

  “In a way he was more company than my mother, in her last years. She was a good bit like …” She nodded toward the Old Man.

  He’d heard all about her mother’s last illness, how she’d nursed her to the end. When she died, Miss Hollisher always ended her story saying, her skin was just perfect, I’d taken such good care of it. And Stanley would wonder what the condition of a dead woman’s skin had to do with anything at all. It seemed to mean something special to Miss Hollisher. At least she always talked about it, so he supposed it must. … Like the damn cat.

  Miss Hollisher was saying: “But maybe you don’t miss company the way I do.”

  “I got company,” Stanley said.

  HIS WIFE Vera, now, she was company. From the time he stepped in the door until he left in the morning, there’d be a steady stream of talk, flowing over him like a shower. They’d been married twenty-five years and he’d long ago stopped listening. He’d known her all his life—she’d lived next door in Gulf Springs. Matter of fact, her mother still lived in that house with her brother and his wife and their six grown children. Stanley’s sister, husband dead in Vietnam, lived in the other house.

  Nothing seemed to change in Gulf Springs. People died and their children took their place, and it really wasn’t any different.

  Stanley wondered why he didn’t go back more often. After all, where he lived in Collinsville wasn’t more than a two-hour drive. But he didn’t, and Vera never urged him to. He just didn’t quite feel right there any more. He didn’t quite belong back where he’d started, with his family and their children.

  Maybe it was his having no children that made the difference.

  Maybe a man needed children. Maybe it was his fault. He’d never found out. Now he was too old to raise a child. And Vera was too old to have one.

  Maybe that was why he felt so lonely at times. Maybe that was why he was so glad to get back to Vera. Her chatter was warming, like a fire. And even more: it was what she brought to him. Somehow, someway, she remembered everything, and she could make him remember.

  Like the time they were playing hookey from school, fooling around back on the old shell road that went to the Spanish fort, where you could hardly find the road for the palmettos that overgrew it, and the still unmoving air smelled musky with snakes. They’d gotten off the road somehow, and one of them—Charlie Edwards, it was—got into quicksand. By the time they found a plank to reach him, he was down to his waist in the stuff; pulling out, he’d lost his pants and torn his shirt. When his mama found out why he’d come home half naked, stripped like a willow that’s been peeled, she was too frightened to give him the beating he deserved.

  That was the kind of thing they remembered. Him and Vera together. And that was fine. They wouldn’t ever be alone the way the Old Man was. With just a lot of images in his mind and nobody really knowing what they were about. …

  The Old Man. So light that the wind could lift him. Bones thin as leaves, dried as the skeletons of lizards or the shells of crabs.

  Only the wind didn’t blow him away. And sometimes you found him looking at you with hooded eyes that were bright and black and laughing.

  Stanley squinted against the sun’s glare. And wondered about Vera. Would she be thinking about him? No. She’d have found something to do. She could always wash the windows or wax the floors. She wouldn’t be likely to miss him.

  At least not the way he missed her. Last night, for example. He stayed in New Orleans, while she drove back to Collinsville. Without her, he hadn’t slept at all, just dozed and tossed.

  He was sure she hadn’t done that. He could just see her settling herself in that bed, pulling the cover up just so, the same exact way every night, just to her collarbone, never any higher, never any lower. And asleep in minutes. He’d joked with her about that sometimes, the way she lay down and dropped right off. “I’m tired,” she would say. “And it’s time to go to sleep.”

  No, she wouldn’t miss him. There was something about her, something that was so busy. And happy. She was her own group. Her own company. />
  Herself a crowd, he thought.

  She was never lonely. Not the way he was.

  He had his spells. The minute he woke up, he knew one was coming. He would lie perfectly still, eyes closed, pretending to go back to sleep: Need another forty winks, boy. Need a little more. … pretty soon, something, like a hand from outside, lifted his eyelids. Even though he tried rolling his eyes up under his brows, to hide a little longer, he’d pretty soon find himself looking out. And the room would be filled with that particular light, not from the window. Even with a yellow sun shining outside, his room was silver-colored, moon-colored. Fish-colored. Just exactly the color of the underbelly of a fish when you pulled it out of the water. Luminous and silvery and changing every minute you looked at it, quivering and pulsing.

  Stanley thought sometimes that he was the fish. That he’d been caught—he hadn’t seen the hook, but then the fish never did either; only all of a sudden he was spinning through the air—and he’d been yanked up into the funny-colored light.

  He could feel it too. Right in the center of his stomach. A pressure and an ache, and he would wonder what he’d eaten the night before. He always went back in his mind, looking, even when he knew that wasn’t the cause.

  He’d lie there with the light seeping in behind his eyes, running around his head like quicksilver. His stomach like a bag of nails. He’d find he couldn’t sit up, so he’d call Vera to come pull on his arms.

  He’d find he had trouble swinging his legs to the floor. Vera would move them for him. Bang, on the floor. All the time she’d be fussing at him: If I wasn’t here, what would you do? Can’t get out of bed by yourself.

  He did know one thing. Those mornings—if she hadn’t been there—he wouldn’t have gotten up at all. He’d have stayed right in bed and waited until that feeling went away.

  Blues, his mother called it. Blues. She’d had them too, he remembered. Sometimes when they came home after school, they’d find her in bed, staring at the ceiling or out the window, and her big brown eyes would slide over them as if she’d never seen them before. They got their own supper; they knew she wasn’t going to move.

  There was nobody to get her up. She didn’t have anybody like Vera.

  Vera. She was a good wife, Stanley thought. They were happy. Except maybe for the children. He missed children now and then. Especially when he lay in bed, in that fish-colored light, when he could hear old man Death laughing right behind him, saying clear as anything: When I get you, I get everything; you got nothing to cheat me with.

  Well, that was true, Stanley thought. There was nothing of him to stand off time, to give old Death a pause. No child, no grandchild. Nothing like that.

  Stanley wondered sometimes if Vera missed them. He didn’t ask; he didn’t ask Vera anything.

  Those terrible mornings, she fussed steadily as she pulled and pushed at his limp body, insisting, always insisting. Until he finally stood up, leaning on the steady sound of her words as if they were a crutch.

  Vera asked: “Where does it hurt?”

  He had to say: “I don’t know.” Because there wasn’t any one place. It was his skin, all of it, all the black wrapping around himself. It was his bones breaking, one by one. Even his blood. He could feel it run thick and heavy like mercury around his bones and around his muscles. Sometimes it seemed to him that his blood was about to cry out and stop. When that happened, he knew, he would die.

  All the time Vera was insisting, “If you can’t say where it hurts, I just got to think it don’t hurt anywhere.”

  In a way, Stanley supposed, she understood. She might grumble and complain, but she never left him. She kept him walking up and down, first in the bedroom, and then on the back porch. He closed his eyes against the knife points of daylight, relying on her to lead him up and down, back and forth, blind man, dead man. When he felt slightly better, he’d open one eye, just a bit. Then she’d steer him back into the kitchen and set him to drinking coffee.

  The silvery light faded, like a fire going out. He got dressed and went to work, only a little late. Never more than two hours. But that night he’d fall straight asleep without supper. He’d notice Vera moving around, tucking covers, fixing sheets. He’d wonder if she wasn’t staying up all night to watch him. In the morning, sure enough, there’d be circles under her eyes, and little lines down her cheeks.

  One day he’d ask her. He’d come right out and ask her. Wasn’t it funny that after all the years they’d been married, and all the even longer years they’d known each other, he still couldn’t say for sure?

  He’d ask her. … But he knew he wouldn’t.

  THERE WAS the boat again. And the thump of engines. And the Old Man staring at him.

  Stanley jumped up, stumbling in his hurry. The Old Man laughed. Cackled. “Stop the engines,” he said. “Dinner.”

  “Yes sir.” Stanley climbed to the flying bridge. “Mr. Robert, he’s asking for his dinner now.”

  Mr. Robert pushed in the red-topped throttles; the boat lost way, settled back on the water like a floating cork. “If he wants dinner,” Mr. Robert said, “dinner is what he’ll get.”

  Stanley stood aside while he swung down the ladder, moving easily for a heavy man.

  “I hear you got hungry, Pa.” He sent Miss Hollisher away with a mock fluttering of his hairy hands. “Stanley, get us a couple Martinis, will you? Pa, you picked a great day for your trip.”

  As Stanley got the drinks, he could hear the Old Man begin to talk, creakily at first, like a door that hadn’t been used for a long time. Then easier and easier, as he left the thick drunken sleep of old age. His frozen look was gone too. He’d come alive, this old man with his fringe of white hair transparent in the sunshine. For a little while.

  Mr. Robert could do that, Stanley admitted. Mr. Robert could always get a flash out of the eyes or a smile out of the false-teeth-filled lips.

  STANLEY FIXED a second Martini for Mr. Robert and then went into the galley where Miss Hollisher was getting the Old Man’s lunch. A line of baby-food jars. She took two spoonfuls from each one, carefully. “There.” The blobs stood in a little neat circle on the white china: two brown, one white, one bright orange, one green. They all had a shiny polished look, as if they were coated with shellac. In the center of the plate the black flying condor touched them with his glazed wings.

  “Now,” Miss Hollisher said, “when he calls, I’ll take out the crackers.”

  Baby food and crackers, Stanley thought. When a man went, he went all at once.

  Not me, Stanley thought. Maybe I can just die.

  Whenever he talked like that to Vera, she’d say: “Lots of ways of getting out of this world, and none of them very pleasant, baby. You got to take one or the other, and it don’t leave much to choose.”

  Funny how she always said the same thing. That wasn’t like Vera. She usually had a dozen different ways of telling a story. Not this. She said this like a piece she’d learned in school.

  The boat was bobbing lightly on a little swell. Stanley began to feel queasy. “I’m going up.”

  “Maybe you better.” Miss Hollisher looked smug. She never got seasick.

  His mouth got very wet, and he spun around and headed for the forward cabin. His mouth got saltier as he felt the shape of the hull close around him. Ribs like bone going up on all sides, closing over his head. And the roll …

  He stumbled up the forward companionway to the deck, his canvas shoes making urgent sounds on the teak. Only when he was perched out on the pulpit, beyond the bow, supported by a steel cradle, water beneath him, did he feel better. He spat the nasty moisture from his mouth; he felt the breeze clean the sweat beads from his forehead. He closed his eyes and let the wind dry his lids too.

  He sat on the railing, facing back toward the boat itself. The big square windows of the bridge and the empty flying bridge looked down at him.

  And then Stanley’s mind made one of its jumps, the kind that annoyed him so much. He found himself thinki
ng about rowing. It was the only skill he had with boats, his quick easy rowing, and he’d learned that in the army. Well, not exactly the army. He’d been going with a girl who was crazy about rowing on park lagoons, and for her he pulled miles of water past his oars. Stanley couldn’t remember her face any more, not at all. He remembered other things; like, she was a great lay. He still had his notebook, his score card. Names and phone numbers and a few little symbols after each one, their ratings, starting with a single star. If he didn’t make out on the first date, he didn’t go back. Those names were lined out. He rarely went back to the single stars; he preferred the fours and fives, he had a few of those listed. In those days Stanley had no time to waste. Not a single minute.

  Now he was happy to sit on a boat without even a good-looking woman in sight. Just blue Gulf water, ruffled and crinkled by very light waves, stretching oft to a hairline horizon. That thin green line westward, that would be the marsh: alligator grass and saw grass and cattail grass for maybe a quarter of a mile before the pines and the hickories and the solid sandy ground.

  Marsh like that was a living thing: it crept out here, receded there; those little tiny v’s of the chart makers didn’t mean a thing. One day a channel would be almost closed, silted up, six feet on the chart but no water under the keel. The next day, or the next strong east wind, it would be clear and wide.

  Sometimes—in spite of Mr. Robert’s experience—the Condor went aground, so that it took all the force of the engines in reverse to pull them off. Times like that, you could hear Mr. Robert cursing over the roar. He was a big man, way over two hundred pounds, with a big voice, and he could curse in Cajun and English.

  FUNNY THING now, Stanley thought, a man that big and that noisy—you should be able to remember him. He should have made such a mark that you could look inside your head and find him standing there. But … try as he might, Stanley just couldn’t bring Mr. Robert’s face into his memory. General outlines, sure. Some gestures: the way he waved his arms; the way he walked, so quickly that he almost lurched across the floor. That peculiar walk was the reason he knocked over so many things. Stanley was always repairing some piece of china, some ornament. Like those vases in the front hall. That was during Miss Margaret’s yellow phase. Everything was done in yellow, the wallpaper in the hall and on the staircase, the dining room, all the downstairs rugs. And of course the flowers. “Forsythia,” Miss Margaret said, “now I want mountains of forsythia.” She got it. Including the big vase in the downstairs hall. The first time, Mr. Robert came swinging in the front door, yelling hello to the Old Man, pulling his raincoat from his shoulders, spinning it into the branches. As he kicked at the puddle of water and glass on the slate floor, he said, almost quietly, “Fi de poutain.”