CHAPTER 8
Hydroplaning

A novella by Lynn Hamilton

A broad, solid Black man dressed in a blue work shirt and jeans splattered with plaster and grease exited from the central entrance of Project E just as she was trying to slam shut the ruined door. Both it and the frame were warped, and the door refused to fit back into the car.

"I cood feex that door for you, but you can't drive a car on three wheels anyway." She thought he sounded Jamaican.

Edwina looked up only briefly. "Thank you for that wisdom of the universe," she said and threw the door against the car again. It bounced back and hit her in the knee. She screamed in pain and bent down her lumberjack frame to grab her knee.

With a grace unexpected in such a stolid man, he leapt to her assistance and led her to his apartment while the pain in her knee was so intense that she could exercise no will of her own. Before she knew it, she was half reclined on a bright blue futon, surrounded by pillows of a rainforest design and wicker baskets. He brought her aspirin and water. The throbbing in her knee calmed to a dull insistence.

He felt her knee clinically.

"I will take you to the hospeetal if you like, but I think nothing is relocated."

"No hospital," said Edwina. "I'll be fine."

He disappeared again.

She looked around her at a large, low-ceilinged room, that had clearly been, at one time, three dinky, box-like rooms. Plaster corners of former walls and rough seams along floor and ceiling revealed that the divisions had been crudely swept away, with a sledgehammer probably. Only the kitchen on the other end and the small corner she now occupied were recognizable as domestic environments. The intervening space was filled with towering sculptures assembled out of refrigerator boxes, tires, hangers, derelict articles of clothing, and wood fragments.

One of them consisted of a tire, in whose center was timber for a fire, some of it burnt, and sprouting out of the tinder grew six tall hanger wires. On the tips of these wires were speared a tennis ball, a clock face, round bar of soap, a saucer, a monocle, and a marshmallow.

"I call that the origins of man," he said, returning to her with a book in his hand. It was Robert Fulghum's It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It. "Here." He handed it to her. "This is the best thing for Zen acceptance of pain."

She took it, but made no obliging move to discover its mysteries.

"Doesn't the state object to your disemboweling a public project?"

He shrugged. "How wood they know?"

She looked up at his satin darkness, his aristocratic nose and generous mouth. There was a sprinkle of gray hair at the edge of his forehead.

"You're from Jamaica?"

He cracked a broad smile. "You Americans. You think every Black man with a foreign accent is from Jamaica. I am east African."

"What the hell are you dong here?"

He shrugged again. "I went to university here, then I got a job managing in the paper mill. They fired me when I became meelitant about the pollution. It is not necessary to make so much. Environmental terrorism."

She wasn't sure whether that last phrase referred to himself or his former employer.

"How the mighty have fallen," she mumbled.

"Pardon?"

"So, how did you end up here?"

"I was what they call 'laid off.'"

"But why here? Why the projects? Surely you could have found another job?"

He gestured in the direction of his odd designs. "As you can see, I got sidetracked. I started seeing these things. I majored in art at university."

"Oh, my God! You didn't go to SCAIM!"

"Why else would I have come here all the way from Africa? Of course, I went to SCAIM."

"What are you doing in the projects? You could be freelancing for a design company, at least."

"You think everyone in these projects is here because they can't be doing something else?"

"Well, the crime, if nothing else."

He made a dismissive gesture.

"I have to die of something. I know what you think. If someone is poor, he is a disgrace. But poor is only disgrace if you are idle. I am an artist. Your state pays me and I do my art-for your grandchildren. The state does not require this-it would pay me anyway. It does not care about my art. But to me, if I create something thoughtful, then I have earned that money."

"Is idle a disgrace if you're not poor?" she asked, intrigued.

"The idle unpoor have to answer themselves."

Just at that moment, Veronica and Margot were getting out of Margot's car in the lot of Otto's Tires and Batteries. The shop was closed, and the last of the twilight was being absorbed into the coal black sky.

"Edwina," they called. "Edwina, where are you?"

"Well, here I fucking am, rescuing you. Where the hell are you?" Veronica added.

Kambaru made dinner which they ate on his futon.

"Is this some east African specialty?" asked Edwina.

"Scrambled eggs and beans? I don't think so."

"Somehow, it seems so exotic when you eat it close to the floor like this."

He had, for mood and decoration, pulled over one of his completed sculptures, entitled "Christmas," and placed it next to the futon where they could view it. It was a sort of stacked monument with, at the bottom, a perfectly wrapped gift, with red ribbons and a bow. Above it, and mashing down on the bow, was a single plastic evergreen branch. Over that was stacked a bare cardboard box, the same size as the wrapped gift, and above that, some wrapping paper, of the same design, suspended in air in a torn rumpled mass. Above that, held a few inches above the rest of it by a thin hanger wire, was a red bow, holding pride of place like a Christmas tree star.

"I know what this is about," she said, taking a bite of baked beans and looking appreciatively at "Christmas." "This is about garbage." She got the buzz of successful interpretation that always eluded her in Veronica's poetry.

"All my work is about garbage," he said. "Civilization breeds, above all, thees garbage. I got the idea when I found that artifeecial branch in the sidewalk all by eetself. Who knows how it got away from the tree. Then my social worker gave me the gift."

"You mean that's a real gift, and you never opened it? What if it's something you wanted?"

"How could the social worker know what I want? She wants me to work in an office."

"It's not always that easy, though," she said, looking at "The Origins of Civilization."

It had been a long time since anyone had surrounded Edwina with a bubble of laughter. Veronica never thought she was funny unless she had intended to be morbid. Kambaru got endless amusement mileage out of her trip to Happy's, her worry about her cherished garbage. "You grow close to something you've spent that much time on," she said. "You can't help it." They had finished eating hours before and the detritus of their meal was congealing on dishes they had stacked on the floor next to the futon. Neither of them had wanted to leave the bubble for the length of time it would take to bus them across the apartment to the kitchen sink, avoiding collision with several ambivalent sculptures.

"Leave your cans with me. I am thinking of something."

"You can use my cans in your work?" she asked. "How?"

"I am seeing something. Trust me."

"Well, if you don't use them all, you'll have to call me. They're still my responsibility."

"Stop worrying. I will recycle your cans." He pushed her back on the futon. She fell willingly.

"I will melt your plastics and clean your bottles."

"That's the sweetest innuendo I ever heard," she said, smiling with a sultriness she thought had deserted her forever years ago.

***

Back on Tybee, she contended with Veronica in a Worst Christmas contest.

"This isn't the worst Christmas of my entire life," said Veronica. "That would be the year I divorced. This is the second worst."

"What about that year that your poodle died?"

Veronica shook her head. "Nope. This is worse."

"The year you had an abortion?"

"This is worse."

"Yeah, it has been bad."

"I don't know what you're bitching about. You got your ass saved and laid last night by a total stranger."

Edwina reminisced briefly.

"And wipe that look off your face," added Veronica.

Later, sitting by herself in Champs by a window, Edwina saw Belmont walk by outside. She tried to force her Gertrude Stein profile into anonymity. Seconds later, he had plopped himself down in her booth uninvited.

"Please talk to Veronica for me," he said.

Edwina saw the anxiety around his eyes and guessed it was untypical of his character. She sighed. "Belmont, I am not a purveyor of emotional baggage. You will have to talk to her yourself."

"She won't take my phone calls! You know that."

Edwina wasn't good at bold face lying. She diverted her glance from Belmont's face. It landed momentarily on her porcelain likeness which looked back reprovingly.

"I don't understand," Belmont was saying. "I thought things were going so well."

"Belmont, what ever made you think that an internationally known poet would take you seriously?" she said bluntly.

But Belmont had evidently lived with disparagement in his short life, and it loomed as no threatening stranger.

"I know she's smarter than I am," he admitted, "but it's not like she's a rocket scientist or anything."

Edwina thought about the Pulitzer Veronica had just missed winning, by a hair, for Half Way There. She sighed again.

"Belmont, as far as you're concerned, she 's a rocket scientist."

***

Edwina thought that Veronica had forgotten all about Belmont until, just two nights later, they went to Margot's, and Veronica ordered a vodka tonic‹a real one. As soon as she had finished it-the work of half a minute-she overturned her glass and started using it as a microphone.

"If you could read my mind. . . " she belted, in her best imitation of Cher.

Decades of smoking before she had finally kicked gave Veronica a scratchy baritone which she could gear into at will. Edwina thought it would probably be okay, if Veronica stayed on her bar stool and didn't have another drink. She noticed Veronica was wearing black fishnet stockings. Where did she get them? Surely not at Cherry's hardware and boutique pagoda, the only department store on the island, where the most recent inventory consisted of short sleeved sweaters from the '70s. The pressure on Edwina's bladder became impossible to bear, despite her unwillingness to leave Veronica by herself for a second. When she had retrousered and burst back through the saloon doors that led to the bar, she saw Veronica, skirtless, blouseless, in black lace camisole, panties, garter belt, and fishnets. She was still singing into her glass and alternately stamping her two stiletto heels on the dance floor. A quick survey of the bar showed that her sweater had been left behind on the bar. Her skirt and blouse left an incriminating half-trail leading toward the center of Margot's flood light. Edwina saw her swooping, straight-backed, toward the floor, closing her eyes, and addressing a line of the song to a wood plank while a group of rangers at the bar applauded her derriere. Edwina dashed over, slung Veronica over her shoulder, stopped at the bar long enough to grab her friend's garments and say, "Put it on our tab, Margot."

"What tab?" yelled Margot, but Edwina was out the door to the parking lot.

Conclusion