William Boyd - Stars and bars

“He’d run out of gas. He had to have gas to take your tyres to try and match them. I said he could.”

“Very decent of you…Tell him to get it all back together by tomorrow morning. We’re leaving.”

“What?”

“Well, you’re leaving. I’ve got a business appointment in Atlanta. Make up your mind whether you’re going back to New York or Richmond.”

Bryant said nothing. She took a trembling drag on her cigarette. Henderson noticed it was hand-rolled.

“I say, that’s not dope, is it?”

To his utter consternation Bryant started to cry. She began to sob and sniffle. She sat down on the bed. After some thought, Henderson sat down beside her. He felt a disquieting dampness beneath his thighs; it was rather like sitting on a river bank. He stood up.

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to accuse you of smoking grass, or whatever.” Now she was pushing all her fingers repeatedly through her hair.

“Ah just go away and leave me alone, you…” She leant over the amplifier and turned the music up again.

With a sigh, and overlooking the implicit oath, he left the room. On the landing at the head of the stairs he encountered the sauntering figure of Cora.

“Hi,” she said. “I hear that you and Freeborn nearly came to blows over Shanda. Very chivalric.”

“We did come to blows. Or rather blow. There was only one actually delivered — American, too.”

“But then you were going to play swordfighting, I hear.”

“Self-defence,” he said, a little frostily. “Anyway I’m off tomorrow. All done. All ‘through’, as you say.”

“That was quick.”

Henderson explained that in fact it was slow. He then told her of the mysterious offence he had caused Bryant.

Cora shrugged. “What do you expect? She’s probably finding it hard to come to terms with you as a father.”

Henderson considered there was some rightness in that observation. He realized he treated Bryant as if she were a slovenly waitress in a restaurant, with hectoring aggression, rather than in any spirit of paternalistic good will. He had never felt at ease with her and after that night in Skaggsville their relationship had acquired even less welcome contours…

He felt suddenly depressed at the thought of his impending marriage to Melissa. It wasn’t so much Melissa that he was reluctant to take on; it was the prospect of a lifetime’s tense and problematic contact with Bryant and metal-mouthed Irv that got him down. He pursed his lips. Then he realized that by some association of ideas — prompted no doubt by recollections of the view down Bryant’s pyjama top — he was staring vacantly at Cora’s chest. She crossed her arms.

“How old is Duane?” he asked. “As a matter of interest.”

“Oh. I don’t know, really. Thirty-three, thirty-four, I guess.”

“ Thirty-three? Thirty-four? ”

“Didn’t you know?”

“Good God.” He felt an obscure but powerful sense of worry. “I’d somehow got the notion he was seventeen or eighteen. Thirty-three…”

Cora laughed unrestrainedly. It was the first time he’d heard her laugh, he reflected.

“Are you going straight back?” she asked.

“Not directly. I’ve got this business meeting in Atlanta first.” He wasn’t really concentrating; he was busy reconstructing his identikit of Duane.

“With Miss Dubrovnik?”

“Who? Oh yes. Yes.” He thought wildly. “I told you about it. It’s a problem of dating one of the paintings. I’ve taken polaroids, close-ups…technical matter I’m not really equipped to deal with.”

“So she’s some sort of genuine expert. Unlike you.”

“Mmm.”

“Is she Yugoslavian? That name—”

“Yes. Yes, I think so. Originally, you know.” They stood and looked at each other for a beat or two. She doesn’t believe me, he thought. I wouldn’t believe me either.

“You don’t happen to know,” he said, “who those two men were with Freeborn, do you?”

“Don’t you know them? They come from your home town.”

“What? Hove? Surely not.”

“No, stupid. Roach City. They own a gallery in New York.”

Henderson clattered down the front steps and set off at a brisk walk for Luxora Beach. Although riven with worries at this new problem, he could still muster an intense frustration at having to walk miles to get to a telephone. It was like living in the Wild West, some frontier town in the 1890 s. The next thing they’d be telling him that the Indians had cut down the wires to make ornaments…

He glowered at Freeborn’s trailer and paused. Was it worth risking it? Would Shanda let him in if he wasn’t there? But what if he was? He kept on walking.

He was drawn up again by faint cries behind him. He looked back, saw it was Alma-May and retraced his steps.

“Mr Dose! Mr Dose!”

“Yes, yes. Here I am.”

“Got a message from Duane. He called Shanda ‘bout ten minutes ago. He says he can get the tyres for your car.”

“Excellent. When?”

“Saturday.”

“But that’s useless .” He actually stamped his foot in the dirt of the drive. “I’m going away tomorrow.”

“It’s them French tyres, he says.”

Henderson stroked his forehead with the fingers of both hands. He had strong doubts about this ‘French tyres’ excuse. Duane had probably pawned them to buy records. “This is madness,” he said rhetorically. “I arrived here on Monday. My car has a puncture. Some ghostly figure volunteers to fix it. A week later it’s still out of action. Madness.”

“What’s a ‘puncture’?”

♦

The walk into Luxora Beach took place beneath the full glare of the late-afternoon sun. Henderson arrived at main street in his now familiar state of perspiration and irritation. In a petulant assertion of his own rights as an individual he decided to visit a gas station at one end of the street that — he had noticed previously — bore the sign ‘drive-thru burgers’. He crossed the railway tracks and the main road and made his way down the raised sidewalk to the gas station. A pickup and a car were parked outside the flimsy shack. A girl — blonde like Shanda, bold make-up, gleaming earrings — leant out of the window talking to two other girls in a maroon car. They looked vaguely familiar: he had seen them — laughing — on his last visit to town. They all stopped talking as he approached. A straining extractor fan hauled thick air from the kitchen. There was a powerful smell of fried onions and cooking oil.

He examined the menu.

“A quarter-pounder please.”

“Onions? Mustard? Pickle? Ketchup?”

Affirmative on all four counts. He paid and the burger duly arrived: a grey ice-hockey puck in a mean bun, a brown ruff of onions and the sectioned knob of a gherkin poking out beneath it. He took a huge jaw-cracking bite. Oil dripped down his chin onto his tie. He snorted astringency from his nostrils. His eyes watered. Mustard and ketchup squelched between his teeth. Still chewing, he took a long draught of Coke. The girls in the car watched him in horror-struck curiosity. He might have been Neanderthal man wolfing the steaming flesh of a mammoth. Bliss.

He heard the rap of knuckles on glass and looked up. Beckman sat behind the wheel of the pickup beaming hugely. I can’t escape this bloody family, Henderson thought, and wandered over.

“Hi there, Henderson. Like our squirrelburgers?”

Henderson managed a smile. “Just felt like some meat. I’m not really used to a vegetarian diet, you see.”

“That ain’t meat , man.” Beckman gave a high, delighted laugh. “Or, anyways, surer ‘n’ shit it don’t come from no steer.”