Remembered

by Slush

His laughter stayed with her until the day she died. And on that day, safe under thick woollen covers, a book lying open and upside down, half lost among the hills and valleys, she heard the Jacaranda branches scratch against the glass and thought about him for the last time. No one was in the house, and soon, very soon, even she would have left.

His face was before her like an actor before a blue screen. Behind him the vistas changed; a run-down train station in Atlanta, a ‘Georgia Peaches’ billboard cutting a window out of the sky, the time he changed a tyre beside the highway leading out of Madrid, the dirty, thick chrome of the ’56 Chevy they had hired framing his sweaty face. Now he raised a pint glass to his lips; now his eyes stared into hers with an boyish mixture of lust and inquiry that caused her fingers to twitch involuntarily. Slowly, very slowly, she shifted her soon-to-be dead weight beneath the covers. The book was completely lost among them now.

When did she first meet him? Or more to the point, what had ever happened to her before she met him? She had vague memories of a happy childhood, a brother, family gatherings at Christmas. They didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she go over every detail, every line in his face, every word he said and gesture he made, in the little time she had left.

So. They had met on an autumn night in 1947 in New Orleans, back when the town was riding high on a heady mixture of jazz and catfish. She was young. She was pretty. She was laughing, walking down a dark street in high heels with two girlfriends, each of their steps crossing in front of the last in a practiced and easy rhythm. She had worked at the club that night, fending off the flabby stained hands of uptown businessmen, holding high a tray of Highballs as she hopscotched through the crowd. But she was laughing.

Irene and Josie met her outside the back door when the last patrons had been pushed out the front. They all lit up in a huddle of cupped hands and headed off into the night towards the rooms they shared, Josie throwing her head and eyes back in an hilarious parody of the night’s lead singer. They were all in a good mood, despite the low pay, the drunks, the bad food and the clumsy passes.

“Excuse me ladies ...”

None of them had seen him in the shadows, but they hid their surprise under another burst of giggles and quick draws on their cigarettes. He was leaning against the cold stone of a shopfront wall. She took in a few details before he spoke next — a piece of paper in his right hand, a suitcase in his left. He was wearing a dark grey suit — it was too dark to see how good the suit was — and his hair was unkempt, no hat. He moved forward half a step before speaking again.

“Excuse me ... can you help?”

He was staring right into her eyes, and something about his gaze made her break the contact, lower hers to his feet. It took several moments to register that he was wearing no shoes or socks.

He had six toes. One each foot. The shadows and light from dull street lanterns could not adequately hide what she saw. Broad flat feet each with six perfectly manicured toes. She choked back an unbidden desire to laugh and stubbed out her Silk Cut with the point of one patent black shoe.

Josie and Irene were still playing along — venting their unanimous desire to help. Apparently he was looking for a hotel, the address of which was probably in his right hand.

“The Sunset Lounge.” His voice was slow, measured, pouring treacle out of a jar. She knew of it — a rundown board and lace establishment tucked away in the less desirable Eastern Districts. She looked back at his face.

“It’ll be too far for you to walk with ... in this cold.” And with that she hailed a passing taxicab.

They left Irene and Josie still standing on the sidewalk before they could voice their surprise. There’d be some questions to answer tomorrow. Nothing was said — and the driver kept his dark hair and ears tucked quietly in a large woollen cap. Soon the muted brass, laughter and harmonicas gave way to darker streets — small gatherings warming themselves before a burning drum.

The Sunset Lounge was dark — save a struggling yellow light in the foyer. Still he said nothing, as she paid the taxi and followed him up the narrow noisy stairs to a room overlooking the street below.

He shut the door behind them.

“So — now you know my secret.” Then he laughed — but there was no bitterness in his laugh. It was pure velvet joy. And she had to join in. Laughing, watching him spread all his toes on the worn amber carpet.

He left to use the washroom. Now was the time to leave — before time and familiarity spoiled the magic. But she removed her shoes and sat on the bed. His suitcase was open — a large barnyard of leather and frayed straps. She ran her hands over the wool, silk and crepe, the smell of camphor and lavender, until her fingers slipped over something cold, hard and deadly.

Somewhere below a car screamed to a halt — and doors were slammed.

Time blurred. She found herself standing there, the door to the room wide open. One man, hands in the air, another dead at her feet. They weren’t cops and they weren’t saying nothing. The gun in her hand still smoked through the silencer. She stood stock still while the second man lowered his hands and carefully dragged his partner from the room. As he quietly closed the door she caught sight of the words ‘City Zoo’ embroidered on his shoulder. She put the gun back in the suitcase, sat on the bed and took a long breath.

The washroom door opened. The stranger walked out towelling his hair, his smile continued where he’d left off. She rose to say something and fainted.

The sound of jazz filled her head. She woke with a whipcrack. Consciousness streamed in with the morning sun. She was a passenger in an overly chromed chevy speeding along some unrecognizable coast road. Her head turned with some effort and then she caught sight of him, driving like a madman. He held her open compact in his teeth, the mirror reflecting the image of an approaching truck bearing down on them. With his spare hand he fired the gun over his shoulder, pot shots fracturing the windscreen behind them. Two more shots and the truck missed the next corner. She caught sight of it suspended in mid-air above the surf before another bend wiped it away. She turned back, incredulous. Before she could speak his laughter crowded back in and whatever she was going to say was lost as she felt herself wrapped in the madness of this stranger.

He told her later that he’d hired the car with money from her purse. But at that point she was beyond caring. The newspapers carried her photo front-page, with the headline, ‘Woman shoots Zookeeper’.

She’d had her life taken from her in a flash, everything that meant something was out of reach back behind the fence of yesterday. As they motored through the hills of the high country towards some unknown destination, he filled the days with stories from his life that made her cry, then laugh, then cry some more.

And then suddenly at a crossroads between two unmarked dirt roads, he told her where they were going and she fell in love with him.

Madrid. Her childhood dream come true. Long nights of passionate music, hot dancing and Sangria with a stranger.

Her old eyes opened to peer into the room, seeking the colours that never failed to unlock her most treasured memories, from a time when she could look into his face and love everything she found. Before she started asking questions.

The reds and golds of the Spanish shawl draped over a lamp were as vibrant as the day he swung it around her shoulders. A brief smile eased her face, eyes glistened for a moment before they closed.

Exquisitely embroidered, the shawl was large enough for him to adorn her in its silky folds. Its lush and heavy fringing extravagantly declared the new woman she had become. His eyes captured her every move as she posed this way and that, careless of her nudity as the shawl slid around her skin. How she swung on her hips, supple youth coursing through every movement, every delicate expression on his face inspiring her to excess. How he watched her through the heat of those long summer afternoons.

Days of ease, stucco baking in the sun, vermilion geraniums on black wrought iron stands, his tanned shoulder glimpsed from under her wide straw hat as she dozes. He moves, her hat is gone and she is dazzled by the sun and his wide smile.

“Let’s go skinny dipping.” He says.

“We’re in the middle of a city!” She says but takes his hand and is pulled lightly to her feet.

His laughter makes everything possible.

Rush of cool water, river sparkling behind his face, surprises in everything they do. He swims like a fish! Her laughter rises up into the dense green of the old trees shading the river as she hangs in the water. Somewhere far below he nibbles her toes in the cool depths.

Cold. She groans and her toes twitch. Those innocent surprises, the little insights into his unique abilities, were only the beginning.

“Society is just a bigger zoo,” he said later, frowning thoughtfully as he watched her over his glass of wine.

Past. Present. Waking. Dreaming. Living. Barely alive.

All these vignettes, the parade of venues. Had she really killed? What were the consequences of such a thing? Were there consequences? Why had she instantly defended this unknown man against the uniformed intruders? Had she known even then?

Again she saw their truck, looming up behind the Chevy, the corpse in the passenger seat lolling with the bumps and swerves. Propped up like an accusation. She could see the driver hunched, eyes locked upon them. Naked fury. Deep, raw, penetrating, excoriating rage. She shivered, and a tear stained the pillow.

His laughter. He could wash the world clean with that laugh. He could exonerate, exculpate, uplift, transfigure with a ripple of sound. When he was there, memories were tamed. Now that he was not, she was defenceless against the shades of the past.

They had slipped out of the USA, through Mexico and down to Panama, where a freighter returning from a run delivering Flamenco guitars took them on as cook and stoker. The crew sang wild, desolate songs under brooding tropical skies, and taught her the tarantella. Flying fish, chromed chevies of the sea, fled before them, and he laughed, softly, stroking her hair.

They were, she now knew, forever conjoined. A story from her childhood came to mind, of mad King Saul and the young David who could soothe his rantings with his shepherd’s lute. What dark deeds had Saul committed? Had he felt, as she did, somehow banished from the state of grace, from humanity even, to a nether region? Had he, too, felt like a dead person condemned to drift through the land of the living, there but absent, inured to all but that ecstatic sound that could reach down inside and reconnect her with innocence, and fun, and feeling?

When they made love, she clutched him tightly, as though at a piece of shipwreck piercing the surface of her drowning world. Below, bubbling up from the depths, she could hear the voices of the dead. “We are one,” they called, “doomed to the same world by the same act. Come down.” Then a laugh from above would lift her, gasping, dazed and astonished, into the land of the living.

She turned her head. There on the dresser was the silver box.

When had she begun to wonder? When had she finally overcome the fear of losing him enough to ask him that first question?

They had talked often enough about the why. About re-incarnation, self-prescience and their abandonment of previous lives, matching well the hedonistic drive of the Spanish. Probing for the key to their existence. What was it that had prompted her to abandon Irene and that other girl, to jump headlong into this?

Grasping the edges of the counterpane, she rolled the hem, repeatedly. A cotton edged mantra against the memories that flickered and stubbornly refused to settle.

Irritably, she shrugged her shoulders, and tugged the pillows higher, once more looking to the silver box. In there was evidence of the shoals of memories that shivered and turned, refusing to be pinned, tantalising glimpses of this past she needed to order.

In one way she had always known the reason for her rapid jump into this life. Her entire being had been structured to make that instantaneous decision — her precarious, constructed facade of self and place from the tatters of a war-torn world was hardly the abandonment of life-long convictions. The club was not the place to find life long commitment, and she had determinedly avoided the trap of trading self determination for security.

In there was her first spanish Baedeker’s. Well thumbed, annotated in the columns with the lingual idiosyncrasies he had loved; elaborating aphorisms with grandiose gestures, scribbling, instructing — gleeful gymnastic syntaxes in the language he so loved. Weighted under the book were more fragments of this united memory. Papers of lost importance holding the powdering skeleton of dried lavender, a scrap of fringed shawl, sepia-ed photos.

Perhaps only two broken halves could so well unite. Bound and made whole, that most important day was there in the box — a faded signature on parchment recalling the pompous pro-Franco cleric that had sealed this union. How his eyes had danced, threatening to break into the solemnity. But she knew why.

She knew him. His person, his past and their future. She would never need to go to the box to know that she had made the right decision.

Gabriel pushed his way through the rushes on the edge of the pond. Up above, in the lee of the hill he could see the stone grave marker she had promised to leave him. Some sign of where she was, where she had gone without him, where he could never go. Turning, puffing gently, he could see down the hill to the top of the rise above her house. His house now, she had told him in that last letter, finally asking him back to where he craved to be. Too late.

He remembered when the moment had finally come. He had always expected it, but somehow after that crazy, steamy, hilarious, lifetime-ago day they had taken their vows he thought she would never ask.

They’d been swimming. They were wet, and a thin Levantine breeze iced the droplets of water on their bodies. Racing back to the car he’d twisted his foot on a stone, and then, hopping madly as it rolled away underfoot he’d stepped down hard with the other foot on the neck of a bottle sitting jagged against the sand. Crashing onto the leather front seat with the last of his momentum, he’d clamped his hand tight against the agony. Then he had to laugh to see her face, peering into the car white and worried against a tangle of hair. Running his bloody hand through that wet curtain he’d laughed kisses hard against her shocked lips.

She sank down across him, laughing now too with relief, and pulled herself into the long front seat beside him. As he groped for a handkerchief to staunch the bleeding, the laughter died away into a calm, still silence.

Her voice was quiet and low in the warmth of the car.

“Who was the man I killed?”

He said nothing, staring at the cloth around his foot. I wonder how long it will take to stop, he thought.
“Who was he, what did they want?” She spoke evenly, but he could hear in her voice the plea he’d always dreaded. Tell me I had to do what I did.

He gazed out the starred windscreen at the empty sand and water below. Then pulling away the cloth, he turned so that both his feet were between them on the seat. He told her what he’d never told another, not through the long lonely years before her.

“These are my wings”, he said. And suddenly where there were six toes on each foot there were only five, and soft feathers cocooned them close together.

He tucked her stunned, still head under his chin. Here, at the end of the time they’d had together, he couldn’t lie. “The man was no-one”, he said. “He was only a man, hunting for what he didn’t understand. Like all men. All of you.” And then he laughed again, long and hard, for the time he’d stolen, the life he’d had with her. Like a man. And he thanked her, and suddenly the wings were gone, and in her hands were only feathers.

How many years since her fright, her confusion, her crazy running away across the sand? He’d thought she’d be back, but she had never returned. What her life had been since then he had no idea. What had it been before him? What was it after? Had she even known? All he had found in the house below were his feathers nestled in the folds of their marriage vows in a silver box, tumbled in blankets with a still open bible on the bed no-one had touched.

He laughed again at the tragedy that was meant to be the happiness of love, high on a hill next to a meaningless marker. And then his laughter died. She had taken it all. He had none left for himself.

“So,” he murmured, as he made to turn back to their house.

Then he through back his arms, and into the high still air of their past he shouted her name.