Robert Stone - Fun With Problems

"Why?" Prosser croaked.

"They won't tell me until I get there. I hear insect laughter. I'm so afraid."

"If you tell me where you are," Prosser said, "maybe I can call someone."

Oh, tricky, thought Duffy, but he would have to know.

"Here's the deal," Duffy said, trying to fend off madness while pretending it. "They'll let me out if I agree to go into therapy."

"Therapy where?" Spearman asked in a small voice. He was afraid, Duffy knew, that it might take place at the same establishment in western New England where he had been purged of drink before. It was not far from the house Prosser shared with Otis. Whether Prosser liked it or not, it was where he was likely to end up.

"I think it's Alaska," Duffy told him. "They'll release me in care of my mother."

"Your mother?"

"Her estate," Duffy hastened to add. "It's absurdly complicated. I'll need some money to get there too, Prosser. Congratulations on your new book, by the way."

A short time later Duffy heard the police dispatcher taking down the numbers and expiration date of Prosser's credit card.

"Bacon tells us," he said to the deputy as he packed his soiled belongings to leave, "the coward is loyal only to fear."

"I need you to shut up," the young deputy said.

The locals were vindictive, especially the hotel people. For three days Duffy was forbidden to leave town, and he was threatened with deformed bounty hunters if he did so. The first day he was homeless, which, in Pahoochee, was itself illegal. His overnight bag contained a single change of clothes, and the venal bubbas who ruled the town owned all the hotels, all the soap and all the potable water. Earning a little more of Otis's mocking solicitude, he was finally able to buy two nights in advance at a washboard-sided welfare motel on a fetid canal a few blocks from the Gulf. The university, for its own reasons he presumed, fixed things with the city. The motel chain hand-delivered some letters to him and to his lawyer in Boston threatening action for damages, though nothing came of it in the end. They also produced a form requiring his signature on which he agreed never again to seek hospitality at their establishments.

While the paperwork and money changed hands, the law required Duffy to remain in Pahoochee to await the disposition of his case. Duffy spent his first hours in the Spray Motel avoiding the public spaces where crack was sold. His solitary window opened on an alley — that is, it failed to open on the alley. An ancient air conditioner aspirated its prolonged death rattle. Mounted on the spastic springs of his sofa bed, he passed the time doodling on available surfaces and trying to sort hopes and dreams from hallucinations.

By nightfall the darkness gave forth only cries of laughter, pain and distant small-arms fire, along with the emphysemic cooler's soldiering on. Duffy told himself that the machine was deciding his fate, that he could keep going not a moment longer than the air conditioning, that its vital signs were measuring his. Like the unhappy man in the Good Book, he had prayed that eve be sudden. At night he preferred that morn be soon.

After first light he looked down the alley and saw the Spray Motel's contingent of moms and welfare children lined up for the school bus. They were all black except for one bedraggled and overweight pale mom with a speed rack of front teeth, who chattered continually to the other mothers regardless of whether they answered her or not. The Spray was no place for any kid to have to live, Duffy thought. But the kids were clean, carrying books, even if their mothers and grandmothers were dressed for a day on their knees with a brush. Or for a previous night of heavy dates. The high spirits of the children lifted his heart briefly, but he soon found the preschool assembly as dispiriting as everything else. It was not right, he thought; another presentation of how things so often were not. And as so often then, things made him want to have a drink. Also not to have one. The drinking life, he thought, was lived moment by moment. He was getting too old for it, and presently he would be too old to change.

He took what was left of Otis and Prosser's money and bought some art supplies at the college end of the beach. He also bought a new cell phone and a cheap wristwatch. Cell phones and wristwatches were items that cops looked for on the persons of sad old men in crummy beach towns. They were signs of some right to sociopolitical existence, of access to human rights. On the other hand, if someone's gad-getry had gone missing in the mall, for example, elderly loser types like Duffy were one of the favored profiles the cops hassled. To crown his respectability, Duffy treated himself to a haircut and beard trim, which rendered him more or less identical to the male section of his demographic.

With his colors and a good-quality sketchbook Duffy picked out a bench supported on its right flank by a Confederate cannoneer and facing the widest flat space between the paved walkway and the rippling Gulf. There he waited for Pahoochee's Sunday to unfold.

The first spectacle that assembled itself was a volleyball game, played by teams of kids from the university. They were a pretty pack, mostly fair, the girls and some of the boys blonded up beyond nature's providing. There were also dark-haired Hispanic youths and a few Asians and African Americans, lending variety to the flesh tones. In the same cause, there were plenty of tattoos, bright new ones with particularly nice greens. Down in the water, a couple of optimists were trying to invoke sympathetic magic with their surfboards. A few managed to draw enough swell out of the insipid shore to get up and stand and surf the film of oily water over the near sand.

There was lots to look at if you were not in a hurry, if it did not bother you that you had seen it before, if you were observer enough — well, he thought, let's say artist enough! — to look it all over one more time. In the early afternoon a passel of extremely self-conscious punks sauntered along the beach sidewalk, looking about as scared and scornful as adolescents could. They were depressing and also frightening in ways they might not have imagined. Duffy expanded his scene to bring in a grove of suffering palm trees, a memorial plinth, an abandoned sandwich sign advertising a psychic. He kept adding: part of a ruined merry-go-round, faded and stripped, between the public beach and his estranged hotel. A bag lady with a Winn-Dixie cart sat on the edge of it; some of the punks draped themselves across the rusty poles and peeling painted horses. He drew it all in, regardless of scale.

Late in the afternoon people came out of the casinos, some half drunk and cheery, more of them looking as if they had lost money they could not afford. Sniffly women complained to the men they were with and got ignored or yelled at or sometimes smacked in the mouth. Men got smacked too, and children who were trying to be somewhere else. Drivers fought at intersections.

Panhandlers turned up and three-card-monte men whom the cops would sweep away as though with a fire hose, looking so angry at the hustlers that you had to wonder if they weren't taken behind some bleachers and beaten senseless to discourage the others. Or to impress the casino owners that there was scant tolerance for competition. Around twilight, several very young hookers came out, dressed to show more skin than the damp wind made comfortable and to match the neon. Their pimps, Duffy thought, would be just out of sight, laughing in the darkness of the side streets, smoking dope, getting in and out of unlighted cars that took some of the girls away and brought others to replace them.

Actually, the evening was lovely, gathered up as it was in sea and sky. Its transcendent light resisted all the defacements organized Pahoochee could inflict on it. Duffy kept drawing as late as he could. When the beach lights and tiki torches and fluorescents came on, he colored them into the rest.