around his lungs. His hands throbbed and seemed too large for his wrists, but he had no awareness at all of his surroundings. He blinked several times and saw Woolsey lying at his feet and the girl standing on the gallery, her hands trembling with shock.
Clete bent over and tore his shirt from Woolsey’s torso and threw it in the flower bed. “Okay,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “We got that issue off the table. Next time I tell you to take off my threads, take off my threads. That shows a definite lack of class and a definite lack of mutual respect.”
“Oh, sir, why have you done this?” the Vietnamese girl said.
“It’s a problem I’ve got, Maelee. I don’t like guys like Woolsey pretending that they’re Americans and they speak for the rest of us. You’re a nice kid, and you don’t have to put up with the Michelin man here. Some nice ladies are coming to see you tomorrow. In the meantime, stay away from Woolsey. This is my business card. If he lays a hand on you or tries to make you do something you don’t want to, you call that cell phone number.”
He started up the Caddy and headed down St. Charles, coughing blood on the steering column and dashboard, the streetcar clanging down the neutral ground toward him, the conductor’s eyes cavernous, his face skeletal under the lacquered-billed black cap he wore.
24
Morning had never been a good time for Gretchen Horowitz. Others on the South Florida coast might wake to birdsong and tropical breezes and sunlight on blue-green water, but for her, the dawn brought with it only one emotion-a pervasive sense of loss and personal guilt and an abiding conviction that there was something obscene and dirty about her physical person. As a little girl, she had bathed herself from head to foot with a washcloth until the water in the tub turned cold and gray, but she had never felt clean. Afterward, she had scrubbed the tub on her knees, rinsing the porcelain surface repeatedly, in fear that the germs she had washed off her skin would be there the next time she bathed.
In middle school she learned there were ways to deal with problems that no educational psychologist would go near. Right after homeroom, the first stall in the girls’ bathroom was the place to be, provided you needed a few pharmaceutical friends such as rainbows, black beauties, Owsley purple, or a little sunshine that glowed inside your head all day, no matter what kind of weather the rest of the world was experiencing. The school day slipped by like a vague annoyance, white noise on the edge of a drowsy interlude before the bell sounded at three o’clock. Her weekday afternoons and evenings took care of themselves and did not require that she think about any issue outside of her head. She sacked groceries at a Winn-Dixie or sat in a movie theater by herself or hung out at the public library or smoked a little dope with a high school football player in the back of his car. When it was dark, she got under the covers in her bedroom and tried not to hear the sounds her mother made when she feigned climax with her johns. It was easy.
But sunrise was a curse, a condition, not a planetary event. The feeling that came with it could not be described as pain, because it had no sharp edges. In fact, the feeling she woke with was one she somehow associated with theft. As the sun broke on the horizon, her sensory system remained trapped inside her sleep, and her skin felt bloodless and dead when she touched it. Her soul, if she had one, seemed made of cardboard. As the darkness faded from her room, she was able to see her school clothes on their hangers in her closet and the absence of anything of value on her dresser and the hairbrush on her nightstand that always looked unclean. She waited for the daylight to burn away the shadows in the room and, in some fashion, redefine its contents. Instead, she knew the shadows were her friends, and the day ahead held nothing for her except glaring surfaces that made her think of glass from a broken mirror. She also knew she was unloved for a reason, and the reason was simple: The girl named Gretchen Horowitz was invisible, and not one person on earth, including the high school football player who placed her hand down there whenever they were alone, had any idea who she was, or where she came from, or what her mother did for a living, or what had been done to her by men even cops were afraid of.
Gretchen Horowitz owned the name on her birth certificate and nothing else. Her childhood was not a childhood and did not have a category. Her umbilical connection to the rest of the human family had been severed and tied off a long time ago. Reverie was a fool’s pursuit and filled with faces she would change into howling Greek masks if she ever saw them again. And morning was a bad time that passed if you didn’t let it get its hooks into you.
Tuesday at nine A.M. she drove to Lafayette and bought a video camera, a boom pole, a lighting kit, and a Steadicam. Then she bought a take-out lunch at Fat Albert’s and drove into the park by the university to eat. There was a muddy pond with ducks in the park, and swing sets and seesaws and a ball diamond and picnic shelters, and dry coulees among the live oaks where children played in the leaves. It was 11:14 A.M. when she sat down at a plank table in the sunshine and began eating her lunch. In forty-six minutes the morning would be over, and she would step over a line into the afternoon, and that would be that.
At first she paid little attention to the family who had walked from the street onto the park grounds and sat down at a table by the pond. The man had a dark tan and black hair and wore denims and work shoes. His wife had the round face of a peasant and wore a cheap blue scarf on her head and carried a calico cat on her shoulder, a harness and leash on its neck. She had no makeup on her face and seemed to be seeing the park for the first time. It was the child who caught Gretchen’s eye. His hair was blond, his smile unrelenting, his cheeks blooming with color. When he tried to walk, he kept falling down, laughing at his own ineptitude, then getting up and toddling down the slope and falling again.
The family had brought their lunch in a paper bag. The woman placed a jar of sun tea and three peanut- butter-and-jelly sandwiches on a piece of newspaper and cut two of them in half and quartered the third for the child. She had smeared jelly on her hands, and she tried to wipe them clean on the paper bag, then gave it up and said something to her husband. She walked through the live oaks toward the restroom, the leaves gusting out of the coulee in the shade. The husband yawned and rested his head on one hand and stared vacantly at the ball diamond, his eyes half lidded. In under a minute, he had put his head down and was asleep. Gretchen looked at her watch. It was eight minutes until noon.
She finished her lunch and looked at the university campus on the far side of the curving two-lane road that separated it from the park. A marching band was thundering out a martial song on a practice field. The sun was as bright as a yellow diamond through the oak trees, and its refraction inside the branches almost blinded her. She looked back at the table by the pond where the man and his little boy had been sitting. The child was gone.
She stood up from the bench. The mother had not returned from the restroom, and the husband was sound asleep. The wind was cold and blowing hard, the surface of the pond wimpling in the sunlight like needles that could penetrate the eye. The ducks were in the reeds along the bank, engorged with bread scraps, their feathers ruffling, surrounded by a floating necklace of froth and Styrofoam containers and paper cups. Beyond the plank table where the husband was sitting, Gretchen saw the little boy toddling down the slope toward the water’s edge. She began running just as he fell.
He tumbled end over end down the embankment, his zippered one-piece outfit caking with mud, his face filled with shock. Gretchen charged down the embankment after him, trying to keep her balance, her feet slipping from under her. She was running so fast, she splashed into the water ahead of the little boy and grabbed him up in both arms before he could roll into the shallows. She hefted him against her shoulder and walked back up the embankment and looked into the horrified face of the mother and the blank stare of the father, who had just lifted up his head from the table.
“Oh my God, I fell asleep,” he said. He looked at his wife. “I fell asleep. I ain’t meant to.”
The woman took the child from Gretchen’s arms. “T’ank you,” she said.
“It’s all right,” Gretchen said.
The mother bounced the baby up and down on her chest. “Come play wit’ your cat,” she said. “Don’t be crying, you. You’re okay now. But you was bad. You shouldn’t be walking down by the water, no.”
“He wasn’t bad,” Gretchen said.
“He knows what I mean. It’s bad for him to be by the water ’cause it can hurt him,” the mother said. “That’s what I was saying to him. His father ain’t had no sleep.”
“Why not?” Gretchen said.
“’Cause he works at a boatyard and he ain’t had no work since the oil spill,” the mother said. “He cain’t sleep
