Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [45]
But no music kicked off his Luce memories. They rose to him like watching an eight-millimeter movie thrown onto a white wall by a Bell & Howell, the only sounds a soft clatter of sprockets engaging holes in the film and the hiss of the film feeding off one spool and snaking its way onto another.
IT IS SUMMER’S END. But not reckoned by some vague astronomical moment when the autumn equinox passes and nobody even looks up or feels an onset of chill. Reckoned, rather, by Labor Day, after which the pool closes for the year and school resumes. Which feels much more like something irreplaceable just died.
As for locale, it’s the town swimming pool beside the mile-long grass airstrip. Two dozen pretty teenage girls walking around the concrete apron, the water dark green. A Labor Day beauty contest back when girls wanted to look like Marilyn Monroe or Ava Gardner. All the bathing suits identical except for color, body sheaths cut low across the chest, modesty panels stretched quivering tight. Deep reds and blues and greens, and then the less interesting pastels. The most popular girls are curvy armloads levered up onto stiletto heels. Scarlet pouty lips. Breasts scooped like double cones of vanilla almost to their chins and glowing with Sea & Ski. Hair domed and flipped and sprayed into crunchy helmets. Pinched waists and asses like upside-down valentines.
Aluminum megaphones on creosote poles at each corner of the pool’s chicken-wire fence blare some fake Latin samba cha-cha saxophone shit played by heroin-addict New Yorker jazzmen daydreaming they’re living in Rio or Batista Cuba. Anyway, whatever the music, even if it were a Sousa march, only pretty girls drive Stubblefield’s picture show. They walk around the rim of the pool, each one a Helen of Troy, launching a carload of high school boys to spray-paint her name on the water tower.
A red-and-white antique biplane lifts off the green grass airstrip into the pale blue sky above the dark blue mountains. Four shirtless teenage boys ready for football season set off running down the length of the landing strip, constantly angling their Timexes, worn on the undersides of their wrists, to see how close a pace to Bannister’s four minutes they are achieving. Townfolk gather around the pool fence and hang over the rails atop the sunbathing platform, applauding all the loveliness their lives encompass.
Luce is one of only two beauties wearing sunglasses. Green lenses set in black cat eye frames. And, by a long stretch, she is the only one eating a frozen Mars bar from the concession stand while she parades. Her lips candy-apple red, and all twenty nails painted to match. Black swimsuit. A swoop to her do so that one eyepiece of her glasses is nearly obscured by a dark wave of hair.
So, what high and mixed emotions for young Stubblefield that day after the beauty show. Driving his grandfather’s Packard back around the lake to the farmhouse, the hopeless and glowing vision of Luce burrowing deeper into his head by the minute. And then the gloom of his mother’s arrival the next day to take him back to Jacksonville for the start of his final year of high school.
KEEPING COOL AND LETTING the memories unreel, Stubblefield wandered off to check out the Lodge. Floor to floor, opening a door now and then, barely attending. All the way up to the sad, airless servants’ quarters under the eaves. Back downstairs, he studied the lobby, the daybeds near the fireplace and the elderly radio. Kerosene lamps mixed in with a few mica-shaded electrics. Woodstove in the outsized kitchen, iron frying pans big as car wheels, and a flashlight by the back door. By the time he finished scouting around, he was dizzy from trying to hold the current image of Luce and the