He decided to try one last time. If there were ever a time, it was this, now, the normally stoic admiral moved to feeling. Vulnerable, he hoped.
“Sir, it is a new world. The rules have changed.” He took a steadying breath. “Which is why I think we need to reconsider—”
The admiral squeezed his shoulder and he felt the bones crunch.
“Bobby-o, don’t fret. We thought we were doomed after the Big One. But then Korea happened. And after that, Nam. This country won’t stop needing us. There’ll always be another war. Another reason to make killing machines. You can count on it. In fact”—he looked out over the sea—“it’s the one goddamn thing we can count on.”
*
The Castle gate had been left open. A sign from the admiral, he thought as he launched himself up the spiraling stairs leading to the bell tower, his old knees creaking with every step. The sound of Champ running ahead, the dog’s toenails clicking on the stone steps, echoing in the narrow stairwell, urged him on.
There was no stopping now. If he, the island’s watchman, didn’t warn them, who would?
21.
Jules
He had bought six five-foot-tall, twin-head, thousand-watt tripod work lights at Home Depot. Each cost one hundred dollars, but if what Leslie said was true—that they were swimming in her parents’ money—what the hell.
As he placed each lamp around the garden perimeter, connecting them with hundred-foot-long extension cords, he surprised himself by wishing his father were there with him. He’d show Pops the fruit trees, their branches heavy with apple and cherry blossoms. The rows of roses fit for a queen’s bouquet. He’d cut the best blooms and wrap the stems in damp paper towel and a layer of aluminum foil. He’d slice off the thorns so his mother didn’t stick herself.
But they were both dead. He could only show them his garden if he laid the blooms at their graves.
His father had been visiting more often. Like Pops’s ghost had hatched with the caterpillar eggs, and as the trees grew naked, the verdant canopy thinned, his father was there, in the garden, more and more, witness to the battle of Jules versus the caterpillars.
He needed some advice. About the caterpillars, hell yeah. But there were his old profs from Harvard he could call about that. Tonight, he wanted to talk to his father about Leslie. He’d been worrying over her since the dinner party. The change he’d seen in her after just a few weeks on the island. At the party, she’d seemed like one pretty white woman in a group of many, chitchatting, air-kissing, throwing her head back and letting loose a stage-worthy laugh. He’d hardly been able to distinguish her from the rest.
Son, don’t you know people don’t change? His father’s voice was back. You would’ve known if you’d listened. Just one goddamn time. Instead of fighting me. Always fighting me.
“Pops.” Jules felt he should apologize. Now that his father was dead and gone, he wished he’d let him win a few battles. He could’ve faked it. Just like he’d been doing on Avalon for the past two months. “She’s the mother of my kids.”
That girl, his father said, and Jules could hear his head shaking, she could talk a pig into eating its own tail.
He was too tired to argue. He had one more extension cord to attach before he could plug in the contraption. It was starting to look like a madman’s experiment. Julius Frankenstein.
And you know, his father went on, you can’t trust a person—a woman—who changes as fast as that girl did. One day, white. The next, trying to pass like she was born and raised in the ’hood.
“Hold on,” Jules thought, but it felt like he was talking aloud.
She’s spending a lot of time with those white boys, his father said, and Jules could see his furry brows lifting. Judging.
“She’s doing her social-worker thing,” Jules said. “She’s got a big heart. Just like Mama.”
He tried to play it cool, but Pops was right. She was with those boys—the heavy-metal kids with the gel-slicked hair and the smirks—most of every day now. Cleaning out the Castle, she claimed. But what if?
What if, his mama used to say, Grandma had balls; she’d be Grandpa. He smiled.
Leslie had been unlike any woman he’d met, and definitely different from all the white girls he’d known, and there had been many interested in the sole black man at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Bored girls he’d met at protests and clandestine meetings of the Students for a Democratic Society. Girls looking for an “experience,” Jules used to joke with his boys back home when he visited on holidays. Girls looking to piss off their bigoted daddies, and prove they were different, better maybe, than their friends. Those girls talked the big talk but most preferred to “stay in,” which turned into stay in bed and fuck all night, and that was fine for Jules back then. The sex trumped the nagging awareness that threatened to cloud his youthful rose-colored glasses—they didn’t want to be seen with him. After a few dates spent smoking weed and screwing in his one-room apartment overlooking Harvard Square, they’d stop returning his calls, realizing, he’d guessed, how very not different they were.
Not Leslie Day. She wanted to be looked at. With him. She had wanted him to see her that snowy night in ’68 at the Golden Pig Chinese restaurant/bar/comedy club in Cambridge, where so many warm, turtleneck-clad bodies had gone after an SDS meeting planning a sit-in at University Hall in protest of Vietnam. To share dragon cocktails served in giant bowls with four or five straws as the windows fogged up with all that body heat, hiding the blizzard outside. They were young and giddy for the future and couldn’t know that, in just a few months, Dr. King would be shot down on his motel balcony in Memphis.
He’d spent years averting his gaze when white women walked by on the street. If they were his classmates, he might strike up a cordial conversation, nothing too intimate—unless, of course, they were one of those girls looking for an experience. All black men, he’d learned young, seemed equally dangerous in the eyes of a white woman. The woman who would become his Leslie had walked across the Golden Pig that snowy night, and, without a word, wrapped her lips around his dragon bowl straw, her eyes on his like she was scared he’d look away.