At last, their number had dwindled to two, a petite blonde with string-straight hair and eyes the color of an empty Coca-Cola bottle, and the other the head cheerleader with the kinky dark curls and the languid hip thrusts, each occurrence of which added a soft boom, like distant thunder over the Gulf of Mexico, to the music Jimi Hendrix played.
Bobby Shepard, with his last waning strength, began turning his hands inward and attempted to lift his arms toward his face in order to prop his eyes open physically to preserve these last two before him, but his muscles would not function and his bones would not move and the lids of his eyes slid together once more, touching closed for an instant until he forced them open briefly again by sheer will.
Left alone in single dance in the center of the fish-cabin floor was the final cheerleader, Celia Mae Adcock, her dark hair floating above her head in twisting curls, the rhythm of her movements in strict time to the increased beat and decibel count of Jimi’s wailing guitar and guttural shout.
“The last,” she said in a deep voice like that of Kathleen Turner’s in any love scene from one of her early movies, “shall be first.”
“What’s the matter, honey?” his wife Myrlie had asked in the bed beside him as Bobby sat bolt upright, groaning and shaking as though in fever chill as he tried to prize his eyes apart with both hands. “Did you have a nightmare that something was going to get you?”
“No,” Bobby had said, listening to the sound of cool air pounding through the vents of the dark bedroom and out on the Beaumont highway a clot of trucks laboring through each of their many gears. “It wasn’t no nightmare. It was just a dream, just a dream. Go on back to sleep.”
Bobby stopped mopping and straightened up, leaning a little of his weight on the wooden handle as he looked about him at the one room of the fish camp cabin. It couldn’t get any cleaner, he decided, at least on the floors and walls, not unless he used a blow-torch to sear over every surface, and he didn’t have the time or energy to try that. Or the faith, either, he considered, sniffing at first one armpit then the other. It might just set fire to everything and burn down the last cabin left still standing from the original Angler’s Paradise. Then where would he be?
The bed, though, he thought, balefully regarding the metal frame and stained mattress against the far wall of the room, now that I have to do something about, for sure. The red marks all over it are mainly just from rust coming off the frame in all this humidity over the years, and that wouldn’t bother me none to lie down on, especially with a sheet or some kind of cloth pulled up over it. But now, a young girl like that curly-headed one, she might think it was where somebody drunk or sick had nastied up the bed or something. She wouldn’t want to lie down on that, not even for a nap, whether it was covered up with a nice clean sheet or not.
“A mattress,” Bobby Shepard said out loud in the empty room, his words ringing hollow in the enclosed space. He had not spoken aloud until then, during the whole day and a half he had spent mopping and scrubbing and deodorizing and spraying for insect life in the cabin, and his own voice had become strange to him. Too loud and abrupt and a little hurried somehow in its delivery, and he thought he would try it again, this time in a lower register and at a slower rate.
“A mattress,” he said again, cocking his head to judge how what he was saying might be received by a person other than himself. “A new mattress,” he uttered, curling his lips and tongue around the words to soften and smooth their delivery. Better, at least a little bit. “With a plastic cover nobody’s ever slept on.” He tried the combination again, then a third time, and then again. By the time he had practiced making the sounds for several minutes and judging them critically as they fell upon his ear, Bobby was fairly convinced anybody who might have happened up, say outside the door of the cabin, and chanced to hear what he was saying would have believed they were listening to a regular person, who talked to other people on occasion or at least knew how to, and who was saying his piece aloud in a perfectly normal way.
He practiced for a while longer, maybe as long as half an hour, before his throat started getting tired, and he had to stop to drink some water from the gallon milk jug he had brought with him from Port Arthur. Standing near the table, his thirst slaked and the mingled odors of ammonia, Raid, and air freshener rising around him, Bobby looked slowly around the room from point to point, item to item, doorjamb to window, oil cloth to nail hole, bed frame to kerosene stove, paint fleck to water stain, from smallest detail to largest feature of the cleansed and cleared space where soon the head cheerleader of Thomas Jefferson High would be performing for him the Angler’s Paradise fish-cabin dance of love.
A seagull had made a bombing run over the new mattress tied to the top of Bobby Shepard’s Thunderbird right before the turn-off to the ruins of Arden Hooks’s Angler’s Paradise and had scored a direct hit just at the point where two lines would intersect if drawn from top to bottom and side to side of the Beauty Rest. But Bobby had chuckled to himself, unconcerned, when he saw the bird swoop and then stall above as it hovered to lay its load.
The nasty mess would have done no harm to his purchase, Bobby knew, since he had covered the mattress with clear heavy-gauge plastic taped down for the trip. The fact the gull had hit its target was nothing but further demonstration of the careful planning Bobby had put into the project and a certain sign that by thinking ahead about any and everything that might go wrong a man could make a dream a reality.
Bobby had sat down for long hours. He had pondered, he had studied, he had put questions to himself that scared him even to conceive of, much less to force himself to answer. And he had undergone this searing self-examination in the service of a final conclusion that he could only sense was somewhere out there before him, waiting like a stalled eighteen-wheeler in the middle of a one-lane road at the heart of a Gulf Coast fog bank.
But he had kept his mind in gear, he had refused to touch the clutch, and he had maintained a steady pressure on the accelerator which fed fuel to the engine of his dream.
And by so doing, he had been allowed that insight which only his gut told him was out there and which his mind could only shrink from. When the fog cleared, its last wisps of gray whipping away as though in a sudden coastal gale, the stalled eighteen-wheeler sat there not as an immobile obstacle which would rip apart the vehicle of faith and daring in which he rode. No, its rear door opened as if by signal, shining ramps extended to receive the wheels he drove, and Bobby Shepard steered his perfected Thunderbird of thought up into the protection of steel-sided and be-roofed certitude.
He knew.
And what he had come to know was this: when a man fails in the endeavor to realize his joy and hope, it is because he loses himself in the need for the goal, in the end of the accomplishment, in the love object itself. Thus his forgetfulness, his ignoring of details, his slighting of process and way. Thus his doom; thus his loss.
And it was this reasoning that led Bobby Shepard to put to himself the painful questions, the second-guessing of every decision, the humbling of himself before the smallest and grossest of each material detail, the learning of and the discipline to a deep patience.
If he had had the space of weeks, days and hours commensurate to the depth of his devotion, Bobby would have spent a year deciding on the brand of mattress alone. He would have driven to Houston to Mattress Warehouse Discounters simply to compare colors and coil count. He would have flown to New Orleans to browse the aisles of Maison Blanc for designer sheets and pillow cases, to Dallas to shop for dust ruffles at Neiman Marcus.
But Bobby Shepard lived on a Pure Oil gauger’s salary in this world and in the Golden Triangle of Texas with its side streets and the driveways to many of its dwellings still made of oyster shells, its sidewalks unpaved except right downtown where no one ever went anymore anyway, and its atmosphere a rich brew of congeners, carcinogens, humidity, and high levels of ozone. The air much of the