Gentlehands Page 9

  “What did Dad say?”

  “You know your father, he didn’t say that much, but he’s not going to stand in your way.”

  “Thanks for talking to him, Mom,” I said.

  “Well there’s one thing your father will never have to buy me after this evening,” said my mother, “and that’s a fur coat!”

  Later, I played Man on the Mountain with Streaker in our room, in our bunk bed, and my father stood in the doorway for a while and watched us for a second or so. He had that little half-smile he gets on his mouth, but he didn’t say much, just to keep it down because we were drowning out the T.V.

  “Are you still in trouble?” Streaker whispered to me while I pulled him down by the legs from the top bunk.

  “I think it’s going to be okay,” I said.

  That night it looked that way.

  13

  WE NAMED THE BABY RACCOON GRAHAM CRACKER, since that was his favorite food. He ate Mignon’s dry dog food, too, and Mignon tolerated this and even let Graham examine the hair on her head, searching through it as though he was looking for Mignon’s eyes.

  Dr. Baird had bandaged Graham’s hind leg and given him shots, and my grandfather had built him a large cage we kept in the backyard. A lot of the time we brought Graham inside and gave him the run of the house, but he was still timid and new to people, and he spent much of his time high on the rafters of my grandfather’s cathedral living-room ceiling, peering down at us through his tiny masked eyes.

  My grandfather had an argument with his neighbor over the steel trap. He’d told his neighbor he would systematically search for any the neighbor put out and confiscate them, and the neighbor had threatened to bill him for them.

  That Fourth of July weekend, when I wasn’t working, I spent most of my time in Montauk. Skye kept making excuses for why she couldn’t see me. It was a family weekend, she said; she said we had the whole summer, but just that weekend she would have to stay at Beauregard and help entertain their many guests. In the next breath she’d tell me that she and Og and Lennie had smoked pot down at the dunes and watched the sun come up, adding always in her coy way that she’d missed me, thought of me all the time, particularly after the pot because pot made you horny.

  “A woman teases that way,” said my grandfather. “You can play that game, too, Buddy. Tell her you have things to do as well, and when she’s ready finally to see you, make a date a day later.”

  I could really talk to him about her, and we spent a lot of time discussing things. When I showed him the new clothes I’d bought, he told me I’d gone overboard, and not selected things carefully. Quality, he advised, is better than quantity. One very good belt on a pair of old jeans is better than three pairs of new jeans and a cheap belt.

  “Less is always more,” he said, “in everything.”

  “I don’t exactly know what that means.”

  “One long-stemmed white rose is better than a whole bouquet of carnations,” he said. “If you don’t know many operas, learn one very well. If you want to speak about Renaissance art, as you seem to want to, select one artist—Botticelli, for example—he was a master of color and rhythmic line. Learn all you can about just Sandro Botticelli.”

  “I think I understand,” I said.

  “Sometime soon stop calling yourself ‘Buddy,’ too,” my grandfather said. “Buddy is a boy’s name, not a man’s.”

  “That would make two Bills in our family,” I said.

  “Don’t you have a middle name?”

  “It’s Raymond,” I complained.

  “Raymond is better than Buddy,” he said.

  I said, “I don’t exactly see how I can just become Raymond around here overnight.”

  “You can become anything you want to be,” said my grandfather. “It’s a matter of authority. Whatever a man’s confidence, that’s his capacity.”

  “That sounds good, Grandpa Trenker,” I said, “but I don’t have that much confidence.”

  “Confidence isn’t something you’re born with, Buddy, and it isn’t something that comes down on you one day like the rain. You get it for yourself, gradually, willfully, and it’s the best gift you can give yourself.”

  I knew what Grandfather meant, but on the last night of that long weekend when Skye called to ask me by the next day, I became living proof of the old saying you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Instead of making a date a day later, I said I’d be at Beauregard an hour earlier than the one she’d suggested.

  When I got to work that morning, Mrs. Townsend was there before me. No one in Seaville called her Mrs. Richards, even though she’d been married to Kick for five years. She’s a woman in her fifties, tiny, with this little bird’s face and these short, thin bird’s legs, and she was fluttering around in his office, opening drawers and throwing papers around, in a tirade about his pot-smoking.

  “He was a brilliant actor once,” she said to no one in particular (although I was the only one around: the cook was in the kitchen), “and now he’s literally gone to pot! He’s wasted! He’s a waste!…That goes and so does that!” She threw some Easy Wider cigarette papers into the wastebasket, along with a roach clip. “And this goes!” She threw a small bag of pot in on top of the rest. “He sleeps fourteen hours a day!” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. I just hoped I’d be off duty by the time Kick showed up at Sweet Mouth, which I was.

  The rain was really coming down by the time I was finished work that afternoon. I stopped at the A&P to get another box of crackers for Graham, along with more sunflower seeds and some marshmallows, and I met Ollie as I was coming out.

  “Do you want to go to the movies tonight?” he asked me.

  “I think I have a date,” I said.

  “We could double because I’m taking LuAnn Derby.”

  “You won’t like the movies with LuAnn,” I said. “She talks all through the movies.”

  “So do I,” he said. “What do you do, listen to all that crap in the movies? Movies, Buddy-wuddy, are to talk in and eat popcorn in.” He laughed very hard at his own joke and slapped my back so hard I almost dropped my bag of groceries.

  “I’m not going to be Buddy anymore,” I said. “I’m going to start calling myself Ray. Got it?”

  “Ray?”

  “Ray,” I said.

  “Fine with me, Ray,” he said. “I’ll see you around, Ray.”

  “See you around,” I said. I started walking toward the parking lot when he called out, “Hey, Ray?”

  “What?”

  The rain was teeming down and the bag of groceries was turning a wet brown.

  “I’m not going to be Ollie anymore,” he said. “I’m going to start calling myself Gertrude. Got it?” Then he raised his pant leg, flung his ankle back, and howled.

  Og and Lennie Waterhouse were just pulling out in Og’s Mercedes as I drove through the gates at Beauregard. We exchanged honks, and I parked as near the front door as I could, then waited for Peacock to let me in.

  Skye answered the door, all in light brown that afternoon.

  “It’s Peacock’s day off,” she said. “Guess what? We’re alone, Buddy!”

  I didn’t show her what I had with me until we went into the solarium on the first floor, and she turned on a tape of punk rock.

  She clapped her hands together when she saw it. “Grass!” she said. “Where’d you get it?”

  I’d fished it out of the wastebasket at Sweet Mouth before I’d gone off duty.

  She didn’t wait to hear where I’d gotten it. She ran off to get some cigarette paper up in Og’s room, exclaiming as she went that it was the perfect thing to do on a rainy afternoon.

  I’d never had much experience with grass beyond a drag once or twice when it was being passed around at a party. I’d never sat down to have grass with anyone because no one I knew was into it. If I thought what happened out in the backyard a while before between my father and me was bad, I’m here to tell you I’d have had bigger surprises,
like some broken bones, if my father knew I had anything to do with marijuana. My father said the word marijuana the way someone else would say “filthy!” He could arrest ten drunken drivers in a week’s time and laugh it off saying this one had a load on or that one was seeing double, but if he made one arrest where he found marijuana on the “perpetrator” (that’s his favorite word—“perpetrator”) he’d act like he’d had dealings with a child molester. I never mentioned the fact Kick smoked because my father would have swooped down on Sweet Mouth and made an arrest before you could say “controlled substance,” which was a police synonym for the weed. My dad knew there was smoking going on at Seaville High—name me a high school where there isn’t some of it going on—but he just trusted I’d never get involved with it. He’d never even said I shouldn’t; he just took it for granted no one named William Raymond Boyle, Jr., would take the chance of turning on and meeting death at the hands of his own father.

  “This is a really neat surprise,” Skye said while she rolled some. “What gave you the idea, Buddy?”

  “Do you think Og and Lennie are the only pair who’ve ever smoked pot?” I said. “Why is it such a big deal?” I shrugged my shoulders and pretended I always went around with a bag of pot in my pants pocket.

  “I just never knew you were into it,” Skye said.

  “Why? Because I don’t go to college?” I laughed.

  When Skye lit the joint and inhaled, she said, “Hey, this is strong stuff, Buddy. We only need a half joint for now.”

  I took a drag and coughed, and Skye said, “You don’t hold it in your lungs. You won’t feel it if you don’t hold it in.”

  She took another drag, and I did, holding it in, and we listened to the punk rock. It was an old group and you couldn’t even make out what they were singing. We finished nearly all of the cigarette before long.

  “Do you believe in interplanetary travel, Buddy?”

  “Is that when two people do this?” I said, reaching for her, and she said, “Oh Buddy, that isn’t subtle at all, there’s nobody home.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means that’s kid stuff, Buddy, trying to make out because Daddy and Mommy are gone and whoosh-bang the door is shut and you’re alone and you start trying to make out!”

  “Whoosh-bang the door is shut?” I said. It seemed hilarious, and I sank my shoulders into the soft couch and held my sides laughing.

  “Whoosh-bang the door is shut!” Skye said, and laughed, too.

  “Whoosh-bang the bore is shut,” I said.

  “Are you the bore?”

  “I’m the bore,” I said. “I’m shut.”

  “I’m glut,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  “I’m butt,” I said. “Sit on me.”

  “I’m slut,” she said. “I run around a lot.”

  “I’m Tut,” I said. “I’m a king.”

  “I’m rut,” she said, “and you’re in me.”

  “I’m cut,” I said, “and I’m open.”

  “I’m mutt,” she said. “Bowwow.”

  Then I told her about Graham and how great my grandfather had been, and she listened and I went on and on about him, my grandfather, not Graham, and she said she had a secret but first she wanted to talk about interplanetary travel.

  “Is that when two people do this?” I said, reaching for her, and for a while we kissed and began to get involved, with that punk rock roaring behind us, and the rain needling the windows. I could have kept going even though I never had, I knew I could have and it would be all right.

  She stopped it. “Whoosh-bang the door is shut,” she said.

  “So what?”

  “I have to change the tape and you’re not letting me talk about interplanetary travel.”

  “Go right ahead,” I said.

  “You don’t really want to hear, though.”

  “I do,” I said.

  She put on another tape, came back to me, and said, “The thing I want to say about interplanetary travel is…”

  “Yes?”

  “Is that it’s when two people do this,” she said, only she wasn’t laughing, and we touched each other’s faces for the longest time, and held each other. “I don’t care about interplanet, interplan,ne,tary, trav-vel,” she said. We did fantastic things with our mouths then and she was so light on me, and we stayed very close together, moving so gently. I said I loved her and she said it back, and I almost felt like crying it was so good.

  I don’t know how many years later she said, “Oh oh, Mummy’s back. I hear the car,” but it must have been long enough for me to grow to thirty because I didn’t feel at all like a kid anymore.

  “She’s back!” Skye said. “Pocket the roach.” I put the small butt into my pocket while she sprayed the solarium with a Listerine breath spray. Then she grabbed my hand and said, “The living room! We were in the living room!” She snapped off the tape and we ran down the marble hallways to the living room.

  Skye tossed some magazines on the floor, snapped on the T.V. and kicked off her shoes.

  I went across the room and sank into a large armchair.

  “Talk,” Skye said. The T.V. was playing in the background, too softly for us to hear.

  “I’m a hut and natives live in me,” I said.

  “Talk seriously, or Mummy will know we were up to something.”

  Then she said, “I’m a putt and I’m on the golf course.”

  We both laughed. We could hear the front door opening, and Mrs. Pennington called out, “Hello?”

  “Hello, Mother!”

  “Hello, dear!”

  “We’re in the living room.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Pennington!”

  “She’s a strut and she’s in a parade,” Skye whispered.

  “Hello, Buddy!” Mrs. Pennington called back.

  “Do you need any help, Mummy?”

  “She’s shut and she’s a door,” I said.

  “We already did that,” Skye said. She whispered across the room at me, “I like the way you make me feel, Buddy,” even though there was no need to whisper in Beauregard. The rooms were about a half acre apart.

  “Tell me the secret. You were going to tell me a secret,” I said.

  “Mummy told me in strictest confidence not to tell.”

  “Is it a secret about Botticelli?” I said. “Is it a secret about his mastery of color and rhythmic line?”

  She clapped her hands together just the way her mother often did. “Oh Buddy, you say the dearest things sometimes! Sometimes I can’t believe what comes out of your mouth!”

  “If it isn’t a secret about Botticelli,” I said, “who is it a secret about?”

  “It’s a secret about Mr. De Lucca,” she said. “I know who he’s looking for.”

  “Who?”

  “Gentlehands. Remember? The SS guard at that concentration camp. He was this terrible sadist and he murdered De Lucca’s cousin.”

  “I think I’m too stoned,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you tonight.”

  “Do you want to come to Montauk?”

  “I’d like that, Buddy.”

  “Come with me now. We can have dinner there.”

  “If Mummy lets me,” she said.

  “Oh Mummy will let you.”

  “I know it,” she laughed.

  “But maybe you’d miss Og and Lennie?”

  “Maybe,” she said smiling, “maybe.”

  We could hear the tap tap of high heels on the marble floor as Mrs. Pennington came toward us.

  “Whoosh-bang the door is open,” I said.

  “Mummy,” Skye said when Mrs. Pennington entered the living room, “Buddy’s asked me to dinner.”

  The butterfly dogs romped around in polkadot plastic raincoats. “I wish someone would invite me to dinner,” Mrs. Pennington said. “When Peacock’s gone, Cook doesn’t care what we eat because she cooks for him, not us! I think she’s serving creamed codfish and I abhor
codfish! It always tastes like hot cotton and upsets my stomach, which Cook knows as well as she knows her name is Cook.”

  I helped January out of her raincoat while Janice licked my fingers.

  “You poor children cooped up on a day like this!” Mrs. Pennington said. “Rain, rain, go away!”

  14

  SKYE SAID SHE WANTED TO TAKE A BATH BEFORE SHE went to Montauk, so I went ahead of her. I was halfway out of Seaville before I realized I was still stoned. I had to keep telling myself where I was and what I was doing. My mind wandered all over the place. I remembered an afternoon in May, after I’d first gotten my learner’s permit. I was with my father and Rob Hayden, driving Rob’s jeep. We were going flycasting down at the beach, and they were drinking beer in the back and playing with Rob’s CB radio. I kept thinking: they’re crazy to let me drive, I don’t know what I’m doing, and every time we swooped down over another dune, I felt as though it was a miracle we were still all in one piece. I had the same feeling that rainy afternoon, and just outside Amagansett, I pulled over and tossed the tiny butt of pot I had in my pocket out the window. Then I forced myself to concentrate, and I let the other cars pass me, taking it very slowly until I finally saw my grandfather’s driveway with the chain across it.

  I told my grandfather Skye was coming for dinner and he said he’d bought some hamburger meat, we could fix something for ourselves, that he was going out for a while on business. He was arranging some wildflowers he’d found on a walk, explaining that they were adder’s-tongues, moth mulleins and saxifrages.

  “What’s the matter with you, Buddy?” he said. “Why are you filling yourself with Wheat Thins when you have a guest for dinner.” I’d eaten almost the whole box, gulping them down by the handful. I’d heard about the appetite pot gives you, and that was probably why I couldn’t seem to stop eating the crackers. Graham was grabbing my pant leg, trying to get me to drop a few crackers to him.

  “I guess I can tell you,” I said.