Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

First, by increasing Jackie’s happiness, a task at which he seemed to excel; and second, by amusing her father. The boy—the young man , rather—could tell marvelous stories. Stories in which vaguely human creatures, in order to sustain themselves, dug tubers out of the ground, captured small birds, and scavenged the leftovers of predators larger than they. Many unlikely animals shared the ancient grasslands with these fascinating near-men, whose expulsion from Eden was a fall from savagery into the continuing benediction of the Agricultural Revolution and Joint Checking Accounts. Because Kha was no longer a wealthy man—first the Thieu regime and then the North Vietnamese Communists had seized his former properties—the material poverty of Joshua’s prehistoric hominids struck him as idyllic rather than distressing. He enjoyed listening to Joshua talk about what no living person could know firsthand, and he lavished food on his daughter’s suitor to keep him on the premises, contentedly reeling off such stories.

Jackie, meantime, would sit at table with the two men, tolerant of their interplay. Owing to her father’s belief that her intellectual capacity and her independent frame of mind destined her for a calling higher than waiting tables, she had few duties at the Mekong Restaurant. (It had once been a Texaco service station.) Kha’s elder daughter, Cosette, therefore worked for him as hostess, waitress, cashier, and assistant cook. Despite a cavalcade of tourists up and down the Strip, the Mekong seldom had many customers, and Kha, until a patron arrived, could usually abandon the kitchen with impunity. Joshua supposed that the lack of traffic through the dining room (it had once been a double garage) prevented Cosette from indulging too active a resentment of her younger sister. Jackie, after all, would one day be a history teacher in the Florida public schools or a simultaneous translator at the United Nations in New York.

As for Dzu, the boy who had taken Kha’s story to the San Antonio papers, he was now employed by the State Department as an expert in the processing of foreign refugees, whether from Southeast Asia or the Caribbean. Joshua had never met Dzu, but tonight Joshua was wearing another of the Freedom Flotilla 1980 T-shirts that Dzu had sent to his sisters as mementos. Jackie and Cosette had spent the last year passing them out to friends, acquaintances, and even blind dates. In the Mekong’s kitchen was a pantry shelf stacked with these shirts.

“Father, he’s had enough to eat, and you’ve heard enough of his talk for one evening.”

Kha shrugged unrepentantly, mumbled in Vietnamese.

“He says you should write down the stories you tell,” Jackie translated.

“I don’t have to. If I wait long enough, I’ll see the replays in my dreams.” But he stood up, bowed to Kha, and told the old man that he had promised to take Jackie to a movie. He kept his billfold in his pocket because Kha regarded any effort to press payment upon him as a gaudy sort of insult.

“An ill-remembered dream is a lost opportunity,” Kha said in English. “You should write them down.”

Jackie kissed her father on his splotched forehead, waved cheerily to Cosette, and led Joshua out the plate-glass door into the hubbub of surf and engine noises that characterized the Strip.

“No movie,” she said pointedly. “You.”

“Where?”

“What’s wrong with your trailer?”

“Gene’s just come back from a job in Louisiana. More than likely he’s reclaimed his kingdom. Beer cans on the toilet tank, clothes down the hallway, a butter tub of guacamole on the TV. Not my idea of the perfect trysting place.”

Big Gene Curtiss was Joshua’s trailer mate, the foreman of Gulf Coast Coating’s out-of-state tank-painting crew. He was twice Joshua’s age and half again as heavy. Three times the victim of heartbreaking, wholly unexpected divorce suits, he went to church every Sunday, but truly worshiped only Dizzy Gillespie, the memory of Billie Holliday, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, no matter their record. He did not consider Negro an unacceptable term for People of Color and had never heard of Jomo Kenyatta, Steve Biko, Robert Mugabe, or Eldridge Cleaver.

“I’ve got enough money for a motel room.”

“Nix on that.”

“Where, then?” Joshua could hear a note of exasperation in his voice. He had been thinking movie, the new Brian de Palma.

“Why don’t you surprise me?”

“Christ.”

“Don’t be profane, Joshua. I’ll give you a better review than you’ll probably give the flick.”

Her whim—which, if he were honest, he could easily make his own—required preparation and a little thought. At first these requirements had short-circuited his enthusiasm, but now that he and Jackie were aboard his motorbike, weaving in and out of traffic past cinderblock motels awash with neon, stucco beach-goods shops, and the fiberglass fauna of various miniature golf courses, he was excited again. He would surprise her; overwhelm her, in fact. Together they would attain to the same fabulous estate of passion previously occupied by Caesar and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guinevere, Bonnie and Clyde. It was a long way to Joshua’s motor court, a distance complicated by campers, pickup trucks, and boat trailers, but, breezily negotiating this strung-out slalom, he got them there in less than an hour.

“Wait here,” he told Jackie. “I’ll be right out.”

Big Gene lay sprawled on the living room’s sofa bed watching a television program. He lifted a beer can in salute. Joshua nodded at him, hurried down the skivvy-littered hall, and returned a moment later carrying a heavy-duty flashlight and a quilt.

“What’s that?” the big man asked.

“Flashlight. Quilt.”

“What for?”

“Clambake,” Joshua improvised, pushing open the door and nearly missing the first step. “Don’t wait up.”

“Fuckin’ fool kid,” said Gene amiably.

Joshua made a saddle of the quilt. Jackie, clutching the flashlight, climbed on behind him, and they traveled northeast along a desolate stretch of highway bordering the military reservation.

Palm trees surrendered to scrub, which in turn surrendered to kudzu, pine trees, and curtains of Spanish moss. In the shoals of summer darkness Alabama loomed up like a barnacled boat bottom. This was territory where, as late as fifteen years ago, backwoods entrepreneurs had erected billboards atop their filling stations and feed stores declaring, “We Want White Peoples Business.” Joshua had never seen such a sign, but Tom Hubbard and Big Gene Curtiss had vouched for their reality. A finger of apprehension drew its nail through the maze of his lower intestines. He wrung the right handlebar to increase their speed and shouted over his shoulder the news that they were almost there. Jackie squeezed his collarbones in acknowledgment.

A line of brick buildings opened out of the countryside like a stage set revolving into view. Joshua backed his hand off the accelerator and let the bike drift into a town with a solitary traffic light. For the past week a crew from Gulf Coast Coating, Inc., had been at work on the little town’s water tower, sandblasting its tank interior down to white metal and applying to every other surface a rugged primer.

The belly of the water tank glistened above them like the turret of a Martian war machine.

A fence surrounded the base of the tower, isolating it from the sleeping business district by a good fifty or sixty yards. Every ancient storefront was shuttered, and the traffic light rocked back and forth in a gentle, midnight breeze. Green, amber, red. Green, amber, red. The intersection was empty.

“You think this is better than your trailer?”