Waveland Page 2

  “Okay. We'll have a nice dinner and all that. It won't be so bad. You'll go with me, right? And we're not worrying about it.”

  “Now you're talking,” Greta said. “I wouldn't miss it. But right now I'm going to yoga.”

  “You are? You just got home.”

  “It's okay, Vaughn. I'm coming back afterward.” She kissed his cheek, picked up her yoga gear, and left again.

  He watched her back out of the driveway and then went to the computer and tried a more general search: “husband killers.” One million seven hundred and eighty thousand entries in six-tenths of a second. He read a few of those, including “I fight my husband's killer with laughter” and several other choice headlines. Then he tried “beheadings,” which produced eight hundred and twenty-one thousand hits and numerous videos. He started a couple of those, then gave it up. Years before he'd been interested in grotesque news, had put together a site that featured news like the woman who cooked her husband in a pot, the couple who kept their dead relatives in plastic bags, the father who buried his child to the neck in ants. There was a surprising amount of that going on, he discovered, then, as now; only now he wasn't that intrigued. Now he was thinking: With Google, why bother with school?

  He did a vanity search and found references to buildings he'd worked on for architects here and there, and one entry for a monograph he'd cowritten in college on the work of Bruce Goff and Herb Greene. It was available at a used bookstore in Arkansas.

  Eventually he gave up on the computer and went back to the television, letting the broadcasts wash over him. There was too much of everything. He flipped between a show on illegal aliens and another show on the child sex trade in Cambodia, both reruns. The Cambodia show featured a touchy dentist from the States who was tricked in Phnom Penh into talking about how he liked to take seven-year-olds to his hotel room.

  “These children are so dear to me,” this guy said in his tissuey little voice. “I have visited this nation several times a year since I first started coming in the nineteen-eighties, and it is such a lovely country, such sweet people.”

  Vaughn felt sorry for the guy, this earnest pedophile. He was being kneecapped by the TV people and didn't seem to understand that; he just kept on confessing. But he deserved to be kneecapped, so Vaughn settled in to watch, thinking of the guy's family and loved ones, the people who depended on him and who cared for him back in Lincoln, Nebraska, or Continent, Georgia. He was a creepy little man, all hair and no forehead. He seemed to have a constant and insatiable hankering for the Cambodian boys, but on this day he was the star of the show. He was pleased. He was smiling. He was the pedophile unfairly tricked by cruel documentary filmmakers, a case study in the modern.

  2

  Greta had the rode-hard-and-put-up-wet look that he was a sucker for—a look few women could pull off because, if you had it, you were traveling so close to skanky, cheap, and beat down all the time that it was easy to mistake one for the other. But she had it mastered; she never missed. Before the husband, her family was a story. Father died when she was a kid. Raised by her mother, single parent, messy childhood and adolescence, small college to study interior design; then her mother died and left her a little pile of cash and the bungalow in Waveland. She didn't like her mother much but was grateful for the leavings. Then the marriage, then that went haywire and she moved to Waveland, where she restored the house to its original specs, cleaning things up; but then Katrina arrived. The house got a few trees through the roof and lost a wall, but she was invested in it so was quick to do the repairs.

  Vaughn had run into her when hunting apartments at the beginning of the summer. She was renting her renovated garage; he was the first tenant. They had architecture in common—she was doing small jobs for people with old houses along the coast. He'd trained in architecture at Tulane and Yale, in the Goeters years when the idea was, How do we burn down the architecture school this week? Afterward he'd worked in big and none-too-good offices in Atlanta and Dallas, and elsewhere, and had finally more or less retired to the coast of Mississippi to get away from the business. Gail was with him for most of the trek. They had some money saved, and he was going to pick up some work along the coast. Beach houses, he was thinking. That was the idea. It never quite worked out the way he planned.

  The courtship with Greta was offhand. They started going to dinner, going to stores together, seeing movies, trading ideas for her ongoing renovation of the house. That put them together a lot of the time. He was glad, too, because most of the time since he and Gail split had been dreary, as though the light was always filtered through tarps.

  One night he and Greta had dinner at Sun Deluxe, a tiny Chinese place run by two Vietnamese women, a typical coastal place—a whitewashed repurposed Exxon station with mismatched booths and flat silver ashtrays, the tables covered in strangely textured red plastic, sticky paper napkins, cheap chopsticks, jars of orange sauce on the table, an all-you-can-eat buffet every night, and no customers. They had an especially good time, and when they got back to her house, Greta invited him in and showed him a bedroom she said he could have if he wanted it.

  “You could stay here,” she said.

  “Here?”

  “Inside,” she said. “Not a big thing, just instead of having to go out there all the time, I mean. Unless …”

  “No, no,” he said. “I got it. I'm there. Let me get my stuff.”

  So he moved into the house, and Greta rented the apartment to a one-handed white guy named Eddie who was a veteran of the first Gulf War and an acquaintance of hers. He told Vaughn he was gay. He was a nasty-looking thing with cartoon hair, stuck up straight as licorice sticks, and a fondness for Hawaiian shirts, of which he seemed to have a good supply. He seemed like trouble, like he could take care of himself and he'd do it at your expense. He stared, unblinking, always looking straight at you, pressure in those eyes. The night he came to see the apartment, Greta came back inside after showing the apartment and said, “He's one of those off-the-books military types they send in for the sterile fatigue stuff.”

  “Why rent him the place?”

  “Like him,” she said. “He's on our side, you know?”

  “Grand,” Vaughn said.

  “He's taking you out for beer,” she said.

  “When?”

  “Now,” she said. “I told him you'd go with.”

  They went to a local bar called Hot-2-Trot. It was a place Vaughn and Greta had gone a few times, off the beach near Central Avenue, the leveled main street in Waveland. Eddie wanted a nightcap. “Just one drink,” he said.

  He got drunk. When he was drunk he asked Vaughn to kiss him, and Vaughn said, “No. And you'd best be careful, as I am friends with the landlady.”

  “Heard that,” Eddie said. “Miss Greta. She's good.”

  “You know her?”

  “Oh… no, not really. I mean, sorta. I worked some job of hers a couple times, landscape stuff, construction. Hey— c'mon. Give us a little peck on the cheek.”

  “I don't kiss people anymore,” Vaughn said, trying to steer clear of any kind of trouble. He figured Eddie was testing him.

  Eddie had giant pruney lips. He was a percussionist before he lost the hand.

  “Wingy Manone,” Vaughn said, remembering the one-armed trumpet genius from some book his brother, Newton, read when they were kids.

  “Shit,” Eddie said, and he frowned, as if Vaughn's saying it was crude and insensitive.

  Vaughn started to apologize, and suddenly Eddie leaned over and kissed him. Sloppy, on the lips, his moustache scraping Vaughn's upper lip, Eddie's lips grabbing his like some snap-on tool. There wasn't anything Vaughn could do.

  Vaughn figured Eddie was screwing with him, or maybe Eddie was gay and wanted to prove it to everybody every minute.

  “Gotcha,” Eddie said, smirking, turning back to his Lone Star.

  “That's it,” Vaughn said. He wiped his mouth elaborately. “Maybe try brushing next time.”

  “Now,
if you'd just pecked me, like right here”—Eddie tapped his lips, which looked like a pair of liver-colored shrimp bunk-bedding on the bottom of his face—“if you pecked me like I asked, you'd have been home free.”

  Eddie had a fancy one-handed cigarette-lighting trick. He did it and then looked to Vaughn for approval. “I can do it with no hands, too,” he said. “Like that guy in Freaks.”

  “People been doing that since that movie came out,” Vaughn said. “The forties or something. That guy had no arms.”

  “Guy was a laundry bundle,” Eddie said. “But I'm bringing the trick back.” He made a big smoke cloud. “They're killing cigarettes here,” he said. “Next month or something. I'll have to go outside.”

  “You can deal with it.”

  “So what's with you and Greta?” Eddie said. “You moved on up? That the thing?”

  “We're friends,” Vaughn said. “We're seeing each other.”

  “Oh, now that's nicely put.”

  “I don't think I like you all that much,” Vaughn said.

  “You haven't had my best stuff yet,” Eddie said.

  They got more beer, and Eddie started telling Vaughn about the war. “It's like the minute I saw those people over there playing drop-the-goat I knew we were in trouble. I mean, drop-the-goat. Right there, you know? You do not want to fuck with people who play ball games using an animal as the ball.”

  “Yeah,” Vaughn said.

  “It's a question of reverence for life,” Eddie said. “Of course when I was over there we toasted those people trying to get back into Iraq from Kuwait. That wasn't our best moment.”

  “I saw that,” Vaughn said.

  “But you know we're overmatched, right? Those people are, all of them, crazy. They're all ‘I want to bathe in blood’ and shit like that.”

  A tall man in the back said, “Hey! Quiet down, will you?”

  Eddie turned around and looked at the guy and pointed his stump back there into the darkness. “Yes sir,” he said. “Quiet as a mouse, sir.”

  “You about ready to go?” Vaughn asked.

  “We got no business being there,” Eddie said. “It's fucking insane. People'll cut you up and eat you, you don't watch out.”

  “Not us,” Vaughn said. “You did yours. I'm too old.”

  That got Eddie headed in a new direction. “I hear your whole damn world disintegrated. Wife left you, you got fired, laid off, you got no job, you cruise around eating Chinese food with your landlord, observing the takeover of your world by younger, less capable guys. By children,” he said.

  “That the deal?”

  “Fucking Mike Wallace here,” Vaughn said, getting off the stool. “Let's go, huh?”

  Eddie pointed to the girl bartender who was leaning over dead ahead, facing the other way. “See this tattoo?” he said, meaning the scrollwork just above her ass. “This is the defining mark of our historical moment. God Bless 'em. Everywhere you go. And they all got this idea at the same time. It's amazing.”

  “Tramp-stamp,” Vaughn said.

  “What?”

  “What it's called,” Vaughn said. “Was in the AARP newsletter.”

  He pulled Eddie away from the bar, said they had to get back, that Greta was waiting on them. Eddie went willingly, and Vaughn dropped him in the driveway and watched him tilt toward the apartment at the end of the drive.

  3

  The afternoon of the birthday dinner Vaughn headed for the bathroom to clean up, and Greta's dog, Monkey, seesawed off the couch and clicked into the bathroom after him, then sprawled on the floor by the back corner of the tub. Vaughn figured Monkey liked the sound of running water. Vaughn ran water then got in the tub, his feet up on the edge of the porcelain on either side of the faucet. He had a Consumer Reports with “Unbiased Ratings: 333 Products” emblazoned on its cover. There were pictures of cars, televisions, telephones, tires, digital cameras, and something that looked as if it might be an insurance policy. He drew the cover close to his face trying to read the type on the photograph of the contract or policy or whatever it was, but could not. He opened the magazine to the table of contents, and there was the same image again, repeated larger this time. It was a will. The issue had a comparison of will-making software. He started looking at that, but then caught an article on page twelve called “Dangerous Products, a CR Investigation.” He went there instead, where he found a picture of a flame shooting out of some guy's hand. The caption said, “When we sprayed this aerosol hair glitter on a fire, it shot flames. We bought it in a store's children's party section.”

  “Perhaps if you hadn't sprayed the fire?” Vaughn said. Monkey did not stir.

  Vaughn had trouble reading. He often read in the tub, magazines mostly, but he skipped most of the text, reading a little at the beginning of a paragraph, then moving on to the next paragraph. Often he'd go through an entire article this way, looking at several pages but reading only a sentence or two per paragraph. He wondered if it was ADD.

  “Earlier this year Consumer Reports revealed that millions of unsafe, recalled products remain in consumer hands,” he read. “Dollar shops and closeout stores have been prime destinations for shoddy products,” he read. “Electrical products,” he read. “Hazardous toys have been a concern since the Toy Industry Association first brought the matter to the attention of the Senate in 1997,” he read.

  Pretty soon he tossed the magazine and his reading glasses on the bath mat and slid down in the tub until he was covered up to his chin in warm water. He closed his eyes and let the steady drip of the faucet lull him to sleep.

  The restaurant that night was all about fat leather seats, dark wood, bright polished copper, waiters and waitresses in starched white shirts, steaks at eighty dollars a pop. Most of the customers had their meals comped. It was dark and chilly in the restaurant, but the bread, which came seconds after they were seated, was toasty.

  The greetings were overdone. Hugs and kisses all around. Gail and Greta might have been sorority sisters. Gail had a new look, thin and taller than he remembered, wearing a leather jacket, a long scarf, Beatle boots. She wore black jeans and looked quite severe with a new haircut, also black. Her nose was a little more prominent than she might want. Still, she was handsome and looked younger than she was. She could have passed for forty. Greta was dressed like a cowgirl—jeans and an open-collar man's button-down shirt, and she was less thin than Gail.

  “So, it's just the three of us then?” Greta said.

  “I guess,” Gail said. She reached into her purse and pulled out a folded section of newspaper. “Your press,” she said to Greta, sliding the paper to her.

  “Gee, thanks,” Greta said. “We spent some time on that already. If you have a cat you might want to keep it?”

  Gail grinned. “Well, you know—no such thing as bad publicity?”

  “There's the murder exception,” Vaughn said.

  Gail reached for the paper. “I withdraw the offering,” she said.

  “It's fine,” Greta said, capturing the newspaper. “I guess I can keep two copies. It's sort of glamorous, don't you agree?”

  “Terribly,” Gail said.

  “It's not every day one dines with the notorious,” Vaughn said.

  They were seated in a booth, Vaughn on one side of the table and the two women on the other. He saw his past and future in a single glance.

  The chat about Greta went on, and Gail and Greta looked friendly—they seemed to “get” each other in some special way. Vaughn just watched and smiled, spun his knife on the tabletop until Gail reached over to stop the knife from twirling. “Vaughn,” she said.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “He does that,” Greta said.

  “I like to watch talk shows on television, especially political shows,” he said. This was his idea for changing the subject.

  “Me, too,” Gail said. “They're so earnest and dopey—it's hard to imagine who they think they're talking to out here.”

  “They're explaining ever
ything to us,” Greta said.

  “Talking to themselves,” Gail said.

  “They've simplified the world for us morons,” Greta said.

  “What do you think, Vaughn?” Gail said, tapping his hand.

  “A world in which I feel more comfortable,” he said. “Beautiful and stark.”

  “Hmm,” she said.

  “I want to organize alphabetically all the things I hate,” he said.

  “You're always so organized,” Gail said.

  “He doesn't hate everything,” Greta said to Gail.

  “I know,” Gail said.

  “He just gets upset and angry.”

  “I know,” Gail said.

  “There are upsetting things out there, upsetting things happening all the time,” Greta said. “I get upset sometimes myself, but then I just let it go.”

  “Me, too,” Gail said.

  “He doesn't let it go,” Greta said. “He's trying, though.”

  “Says he is,” Gail said, readying her salad for eating. The salads were spare and lovely on shallow white plates, little arrays of lettuces and walnuts. “So what happened to the new you?” Gail said.

  “I'm still here,” he said. “I just forget sometimes.”

  They began to eat. They talked all during dinner, nonstop— last year's hurricane, the trash still scattered around, the way it still looked in some places as if the storm had just come through in the last week, the politics of gambling on the coast, the casinos, the usual.

  “When they have a war, have they always just reported the number of Americans killed?” Gail said. “I hate that.”

  “They used to report the number of Americans and the much bigger number of enemies,” Vaughn said. “To prove we were winning.”

  “Stupid war,” Greta said. “They should have put Saddam back in charge when they found him.”

  They talked about Eddie, and Vaughn said Eddie had said he'd worked for Greta, and Greta said yeah, and he had good bona fides, so she didn't mind renting to him. They chatted about what Vaughn was doing for work, which was nothing but a couple of classes at the college, and Gail asked about Newton and Vaughn reminded her that he really didn't know, and then she, naturally, apologized for asking, and said she never really understood why there was so much bad blood between brothers, and Vaughn said there wasn't so much bad blood, it's just that they were different people, and then everybody made faces as if that sounded so lame, so he just waved it off, changed the subject again to ask her about their house, still jointly held, which she said was holding up, and that it had finally gotten the new roof it didn't really need courtesy of the insurance company, and then she told Vaughn and Greta about some of her projects, and asked if they'd seen her on TV on the news a month or so before, and they said they hadn't, but wished they had. It was strange how much talk there was, it just seemed to pour out of them and stay neatly away from worrisome spots, too, once they got started, as if all of them knew the territory well. Later, when dinner was over and coffee had been declined, Vaughn reached for the check and Gail rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, stopping him dead. “You got it,” he said.