Everything's Eventual

   'Eeeee,' I said . . . just to see how it sounded. I dropped the package of Marlboros into the gutter and began stamping it methodically as I sat there on the curb. 'Eeeee. Eeeee. Eeeeee.'

   One of the cops standing by the sawhorses looked over at me. 'Hey, buddy, want to stop being a pain in the butt?' he called over. 'We got us a situation here.'

   Of course you do, I thought. Don't we all.

   I didn't say anything, though. I stopped stamping—the cigarette pack was pretty well dead by then, anyway— and stopped making the noise. I could still hear it in my head, though, and why not? It makes as much sense as anything else.

   Eeeeeee.

   Eeeeeee.

   Eeeeeee.

That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French

Floyd, what's that over there? Oh shit.

   The man's voice speaking these words was vaguely familiar, but the words themselves were just a disconnected snip of dialogue, the kind of thing you heard when you were channel-surfing with the remote. There was no one named Floyd in her life. Still, that was the start. Even before she saw the little girl in the red pinafore, there were those disconnected words.

   But it was the little girl who brought it on strong. 'Oh-oh, I'm getting that feeling,' Carol said.

   The girl in the pinafore was in front of a country market called Carson's—BEER, WINE, GROC, FRESH BAIT, LOTTERY—crouched down with her butt between her ankles and the bright-red apron-dress tucked between her thighs, playing with a doll. The doll was yellowhaired and dirty, the kind that's round and stuffed and boneless in the body.

   'What feeling?' Bill asked.

   'You know. The one you can only say what it is in French. Help me here.'

   'Deja vu,' he said.

   'That's it,' she said, and turned to look at the little girl one more time. She'll have the doll by one leg, Carol thought. Holding it upside down by one leg with its grimy yellow hair hanging down.

  But the little girl had abandoned the doll on the store's splintery gray steps and had gone over to look at a dog caged up in the back of a station wagon. Then Bill and Carol Shelton went around a curve in the road and the store was out of sight.

   'How much farther?' Carol asked.

   Bill looked at her with one eyebrow raised and his mouth dimpled at one corner—left eyebrow, right dimple, always the same. The look that said, You think I'm amused, but I'm really irritated. For the ninety trillionth or so time in the marriage, I'm really irritated. You don't know that, though, because you can only see about two inches into me and then your vision fails.

   But she had better vision than he realized; it was one of the secrets of the marriage. Probably he had a few secrets of his own. And there were, of course, the ones they kept together.

   'I don't know,' he said. 'I've never been here.'

   'But you're sure we're on the right road.'

   'Once you get over the causeway and onto Sanibel Island, there's only one,' he said. 'It goes across to Captiva, and there it ends. But before it does we'll come to Palm House. That I promise you.'

   The arch in his eyebrow began to flatten. The dimple began to fill in. He was returning to what she thought of as the Great Level. She had come to dislike the Great Level, too, but not as much as the eyebrow and the dimple, or his sarcastic way of saying 'Excuse me?' when you said something he considered stupid, or his habit of pooching out his lower lip when he wanted to appear thoughtful and deliberative.

   'Bill?'

   'Mmm?'

   'Do you know anyone named Floyd?'

   'There was Floyd Denning. He and I ran the downstairs snack bar at Christ the Redeemer in our senior year. I told you about him, didn't I? He stole the Coke money one Friday and spent the weekend in New York with his girlfriend. They suspended him and expelled her. What made you think of him?'

   'I don't know,' she said. Easier than telling him that the Floyd with whom Bill had gone to high school wasn't the Floyd the voice in her head was speaking to. At least, she didn't think it was.

   Second honeymoon, that's what you call this, she thought, looking at the palms that lined Highway 867, a white bird that stalked along the shoulder like an angry preacher, and a sign that read SEMINOLE WILDLIFE PARK, BRING A CARFUL FOR $10. Florida the Sunshine State. Florida the Hospitality State. Not to mention Florida the Second-Honeymoon State. Florida, where Bill Shelton and Carol Shelton, the former Carol O'Neill, of Lynn, Massachusetts, came on their first honeymoon twenty-five years before. Only that was on the other side, the Atlantic side, at a little cabin colony, and there were cockroaches in the bureau drawers. He couldn't stop touching me. That was all right, though, in those days I wanted to be touched. Hell, I wanted to be torched like Atlanta in Gone With the Wind, and he torched me, rebuilt me, torched me again. Now it's silver. Twenty-five is silver. And sometimes I get that feeling.

   They were approaching a curve, and she thought, Three crosses on the right side of the road. Two small ones flanking a bigger one. The small ones are clapped-together wood. The one in the middle is white birch with a picture on it, a tiny photograph of the seventeen-year-old boy who lost control of his car on this curve one drunk night that was his last drunk night, and this is where his girlfriend and her girlfriends marked the spot—

   Bill drove around the curve. A pair of black crows, plump and shiny, lifted off from something pasted to the macadam in a splat of blood. The birds had eaten so well that Carol wasn't sure they were going to get out of the way until they did. There were no crosses, not on the left, not on the right. Just roadkill in the middle, a woodchuck or something, now passing beneath a luxury car that had never been north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

   Floyd, what's that over there?

   'What's wrong?'

   'Huh?' She looked at him, bewildered, feeling a little wild.

   'You're sitting bolt-upright. Got a cramp in your back?'

   'Just a slight one.' She settled back by degrees. 'I had that feeling again. The deja vu.'

   'Is it gone?'

   'Yes,' she said, but she was lying. It had retreated a little, but that was all. She'd had this before, but never so continuously. It came up and went down, but it didn't go away. She'd been aware of it ever since that thing about Floyd started knocking around in her head—and then the little girl in the red pinafore.

   But, really, hadn't she felt something before either of those things? Hadn't it actually started when they came down the steps of the Lear

35 into the hammering heat of the Fort Myers sunshine? Or even before? En route from Boston?