Naked in Garden Hills

  Naked in Garden Hills

  A novel

  Harry Crews

  1969

  This book is for Sally Ellis Crews

  whose talent is love

  1

  In a cabin on the treeless side of Phosphate Mountain, Jester was asleep in the saddle. He lay in the legs of his high-yellow woman and dreamed of the Kentucky Derby. It was the Run For The Roses and the smell of money was in the air. His nostrils flared, and his tiny, iron, yellow-palmed hands held the oily reins tight. His green and yellow silks fluttered over a stallion whose mane and tail were black fire. The horse was enormous, cantering sidewise as they approached the starting gate, pawing the earth, snorting, breathing like a bellows. Jester rode him high and light the way a leaf rides the wind. He was not afraid.

  The crowd was there, spilling away from him, its baying white face turned up to him, pleading for the black stallion’s victory. Men and women at the rail and in the stands waved their arms madly, their betting slips clutched tightly, begged him to save them, to make this race their race. But Jester would not so much as turn his head to look. Why should he? He and the horse were one. Black blood coursed through the terrific muscles of the horse. He had power between his legs that could win—win it all. He was invincible.

  They were in the gate. The starter looked them over and put his thumb on the button that would slam the iron gates open and start the race.

  Suddenly the horse reared, and Lucy rolled him off her and went to the bathroom. Jester watched her pad across the room, then closed his eyes and tried to take hold of the dream again. But it was gone. Reluctantly he opened his eyes and looked at an enraged, charging hippopotamus. It was coming out of a poster stuck onto the wall at the foot of the bed. The tiny ears stood forward, the huge red mouth yawned showing teeth like round white pegs driven into the gums. Dust swirled. The earth shook. Jester looked away from the hippopotamus. A jaguar crouched to spring. Its eyes glittered in a jungle thick as night. Its teeth were red; the lips curled back in a feeding frenzy. A man with two heads leered at him from the far corner and just above him a human fetus floated upside down in a sealed jar. Jester’s eyes slid uneasily around the room. He could never get used to waking up surrounded by animals and Ferris wheels and sideshow freaks.

  He got off the bed and went to the window and drew the blind all the way to the top. Light flooded the room, and the posters immediately became one-dimensional, glossy—nothing but paper and paint. He opened the window. A yellow cloud hung low over the earth. A smell like that of burning cloth drifted in from green ponds of stagnant water. Jester breathed deeply and coughed.

  On all sides of Phosphate Mountain for nearly as far as he could see were mounds of earth the color of potash and partially covered with a ragged fringe of weeds and rusted pieces of machinery. Down the valleys broken strands of barbed wire had fallen between rotted, leaning posts. Metal conveyor belts, corroded and frozen in disuse, lay twisted and broken in the weeds. From the window, Jester could look straight into the deep hole of Garden Hills. At the very lowest point in the sodden excavation were six rows of houses with six houses in each row. A single wide dirt street went down one slope of the hole, between the two center rows of houses, and up the far slope.

  Off to the right, its smokestacks rising into the yellow mist like the spires of a cathedral, was an abandoned phosphate plant made of brick and turned almost black with age. And a half mile away, directly across the excavation of Garden Hills on a high plateau of earth, was the house of Fat Man. It was made of the same brick, turned the same color, and from a distance, seemed a small replica of the abandoned phosphate plant. One end of the road that led through Garden Hills stopped at the plant; the other end stopped at Fat Man’s.

  And above and beyond Fat Man’s house was the four-lane superhighway connecting Orlando and Tampa. The yellow cloud that hung perpetually above Garden Hills did not reach as far as the highway. And the highway, brilliant in the morning sun, rose and finally disappeared into the horizon. Automobiles, low and sleek and powerful, burst past in flashes of light.

  But not all of them were passing. Even from this far away Jester could see that some tourists had stopped beside the highway in Reclamation Park. Glittering cars were parked amongst the shrubbery. A few screaming children raced along the footpaths between sunglassed baseballcapped parents with Kodak Instamatics strung from their necks. A small crowd hovered about the high, gray Quarter-A-Look Telescope mounted on a swivel overlooking Garden Hills. They were starting earlier every day. Jester couldn’t remember there ever being so many this early in the morning. Fat Man would be awake by now. Jester would have to hurry if he was going to have time to talk to the horse.

  The high-yellow woman had come back from the bathroom. She sat naked on the side of the bed and watched him dress. And without looking at her, he knew she was smiling, watching him pull on the green silk suit, tailored to a perfect fit and the size of a child’s Halloween costume. Everyone smiled at him. They always had. He was cute.

  “You cute,” she said.

  He went on with what he was doing, pretending to ignore her.

  “You good, too,” she said. “Better’n all them other’n.”

  He smiled. There was a diamond chip and a gold heart in the smile—inlaid in the enamel of his two front middle teeth.

  “You don’t have to go now,” she said.

  “Do,” he said. “Do too.”

  “It’s early. You ain’t had you breakfast.”

  “Eat at the big house,” he said.

  Without a mirror, he knotted a green silk tie over a yellow shirt. “My, you naturally can put on some clothes,” she said. She got up as if to touch him. He moved lightly away, cinching the tie snugly to his throat as he did. She sat back down. But she wasn’t smiling now. He had not taken his socks off during the night, and without taking his eyes off Lucy, he sat on a ladder-back chair and pulled on his jockey boots. The boots had raised, wooden heels and steel eyelets that bound his ankles tightly inside the iron racing stirrups.

  “Fat Man he ain’t up yet,” she said.

  “Up and waiting,” he said.

  “You scared of Fat Man? Scared to keep him waiting?”

  “Know better’n that,” he said. “Got to see Miss Dolly.”

  “I ain’t meant it,” she said. “But I want to feed you. You got to be fed.”

  “Going now,” he said and stood up. In his heeled jockey boots, he was almost four feet tall.

  Lucy watched him now as he went to the dresser and picked up his watch and money clip. He was the most perfect thing she had ever seen. His blue-black face was smooth, ageless and high-cheeked. His thick, tight hair was clipped short and rode his head like a cap. And the yellow of his shirt was reflected in the diamond inlaid in his smile.

  “Ah, you real, you a real thing,” she said. “Come here you jockey.”

  He watched her from where he stood by the dresser, nervously twisting the ring shaped like a saddle that he wore on the middle finger of his left hand.

  “Got time for no foolishness,” he said. But he came to her anyway. She put her hands on his shoulders, and he braced his short, bowed legs. She knew he did not like for her to fondle him, but she could never keep her hands off him. It was like touching some finely wrought thing found in the woods—like a round stone or a piece of smooth wood or a bird egg. He endured her hands without moving, looking over her shoulder at some point on the far wall between the hippopotamus and the jaguar. She touched his back, the round muscle of his rocklike buttock.

  “You coming back up here this evening?” she asked.

  “Got the running of the Belmont on the T.V. Caint.”

  “I’d like to see that Belmont on the T.V
. myself.”

  “Turn on the RCA Victor,” he said, pointing to a television set in the corner. “Cost Fat Man four hundred good dollars. Turn it on.”

  “Want to see it with you,” she said sullenly.

  “Fat Man don’t want nothing like you under his roof.”

  “Ask him, you hear?”

  “Ask him plenty. Say no. Say nothing like you under his roof.” He drew back a half step and looked at her. “Don’t this beat hell out of a circus tent?” He waved his hand. “Look at what I done.” The cabin had been paneled with prefabricated mahogany. There was an Acrilan pile carpet on the floor and silk sheets on the bed. “Got everything up here on this Phosphate Mountain.”

  She rubbed him. “Not everything.”

  “Doing the best I can,” he said. “Now let go. Don’t wrinkle me.”

  Still sitting on the bed, she pulled him in between her legs and kissed him. “When you be back?”

  “Caint say. Maybe tomorrow. Count this while I’m gone.” He took out a money clip shaped like a horseshoe and snapped off several bills.

  She put the money on the bed beside her without looking at it. “Ask him again,” she said.

  He stopped in the door. “Fat Man say nothing like you under his roof.”

  The car was parked pointing downhill on the steep road in front of the cabin. It was an old Buick Sedan with enormous balloon fenders and chrome headlights and curtains over the back windows. He stood on the running board and looked down into Garden Hills. The twelve houses—six on either side of the road—that were still occupied had thin wood smoke curling from their chimneys. There was a horse and wagon stopped in front of one of the cabins. It belonged to the iceman. Jester snatched the door open and cranked the car. He was so small that the pedals and seat had been modified so he could drive. He heard the high-yellow woman calling good-bye and he knew she was waving to him, but his attention now was fixed on the horse and he didn’t look back. It was only three hundred yards or so down the side of Phosphate Mountain—which was no mountain at all but rather the largest hill of earth left by the abandoned mining operation. Jester headed the big car down into Garden Hills, driving slowly, keeping the car under a tight rein, because he knew the people didn’t like to see him driving unless Fat Man was with him. It was early enough that no one was on the slanted porches facing the road, or in the bare white yards beyond the porches. A starved dog with one ear stood in a ditch and did not bark. And a single chicken with a long ruffled neck ran across the road in front of the car.

  Nobody was near the horse. It stood where the reins had been dropped by the ditch. A wide dark canvas, still damp from yesterday’s ice, was folded across the top of the wagon. The air was hotter here in the bottom of the hole than it had been on the side of Phosphate Mountain, and the canvas was starting to steam. Jester drove slower and slower and finally eased to a stop beside the horse. He left the Buick idling in the middle of the road, not having to worry about other cars, Fat Man’s being the only one in Garden Hills. He got out of the car and stood in the road. The horse had not moved. Its eyes were closed. Its long bony neck sagged; the nose almost touched the ground. Jester was close enough now to smell the steamy musk of harness and hide.

  “Ahhhhhh, horse,” said Jester, planting his high- heeled jockey boots in the white ashlike earth.

  He felt again the heat of the dream between his legs. And he stood, half-squatted, frozen there in the dust to receive the thrust of the running horse. The crowd roared. His heart pumped. It would be an easy victory. All he had to do was take the wire. He rose in the stirrups, ready to go to the whip, when the iceman came out of his cabin picking his teeth with a piece of broomstraw.

  Jester heard the screen door slam and straightened up. His rigid muscles relaxed. He stood back on his heels and turned the horse loose. But the iceman never looked at him. He stood with his gaze fastened on the Buick Sedan. His tongue flipped the straw quickly across his lips several times and then, with his eyes never leaving the car, he came down the steps and across the yard to the ditch by the road. He was a tall, thin man with a tight face, thin-lipped and squinting. The skin on his face and neck and the backs of his hands was red and raw from the wind. The iceman, whose name was Westrim and who had once been called Wes but who was known only as Iceman now even to his wife, had at one time owned a Buick Sedan. It was behind his cabin now, almost hidden by weeds, up on blocks, the tires rotted and blown from dry rot, and the front seat taken out and made into a couch just inside the first room of his cabin.

  But it had been new once. Iceman remembered as though it were this moment: the powerful throb of the engine, the rich softness of the seats, the good smell of rubber floor mats and gasoline, and finally, finally he remembered how it would take him out of Garden Hills, down the super, four-lane highway to the city of Beverly. He was about to make the same trip now in his wagon to pick up the ice, and he wouldn’t get back with the load until twelve, maybe one o’clock in the afternoon.

  “How’s Fat Man this morning?”

  “Good,” said Jester. And poised, tense, his eyes moved slowly from the horse just as Iceman’s eyes turned briefly from the car, and their gaze locked— hung momentarily—then crossed, Jester’s going back to the horse still asleep in the harness and Iceman’s back to the Buick still idling in the road.

  But for the moment, the two men had balanced each other there, looking into and out of the same mirage, the same impossible dream. And the dream—called history and finally even truth—went this way though neither of them could have said it, because neither of them knew all of it.

  There was a time when Garden Hills had no hills. It was a ten-mile square of barren soil lying in the middle of the Florida peninsula sustaining a few families without jobs or hope. One or two raised small patches of cabbage. One made illegal whiskey. At least one prayed.

  Then the land boom came. Men saw heaven in a pound of Florida soil. They woke up with its name on their lips in the middle of the night. Prices skyrocketed. So a man bought it, the ten square miles, without ever seeing it because after all it was in Florida and it was dry. What else did he need to know? And the new owner who was a land speculator, named it Garden Hills and dispatched a man to put up a sign to that effect—despite the fact that there wasn’t a decent hill south of Jacksonville. But the sign was no sooner planted than the Market crashed and the Boom busted and men jumped out of windows all across the country. And one of the men who jumped was the land speculator. It was out of a fifth-story window onto a parked car across town from the Hotel Giaconda in New York City. It killed him and ruined the car.

  And though the ten square miles on the Florida peninsula still had no hills, it had a name that said it did: GARDEN HILLS. The sign, tall as a man’s head and painted in black letters on a white ground, stood in the middle of the tract … a prophesy.

  And finally another man, after the failed market had cured itself, fulfilled the prophesy, though nobody in Garden Hills ever saw him. His name was Jack O’Boylan, and he looked and saw that it was real good.

  “It’s real good,” he cried, jamming his finger into his geologists’ report. “I’ll build.”

  And he did. Without ever visiting Garden Hills, operating entirely through his men, who discovered it in the first place, and examined it and tested it, and analyzed it and typed it up and turned it in—operating entirely through such men, Jack O’Boylan built the largest phosphate mining plant in the world.

  But first, he had to take possession of the land. “Where?”

  And one of his young men, crouched, ever on the ready, leaped and snatched a map out of its rolled place on the wall. “There,” he cried. “That penis [for he was a bright young man] hanging off the belly of the continent. FLORIDA!”

  “Buy and build,” said Jack O’Boylan.

  And so his men went again to Garden Hills, flat and burning under the Florida sun. They came driving black cars embossed with the company seal and wearing monogrammed jackets and shirt
s. They stood in the sand spurs and used boxes of company handkerchiefs. And behind them came flatbed trucks with caterpillars and tractors and grading machines. The geologists ran more tests, examined more soil, analyzed the strata and substrata, drilled, crushed and blasted. The noise brought men from miles around out of their shacks, through the saw palmetto and scrub oak. They came shyly at first, then as nobody paid them any attention more boldly, coming closer, standing in their faded overalls, silent, watching.

  “What is it?” one finally asked. Nobody knew. But they watched and finally figured it out.

  “It’s a factry,” said a man wearing shoes. “They gone dig.”

  “It’ll be work for everybody,” said another. “They gone dig.”

  They never thought to ask what they were going to dig for. That was beside the point. It was hope— whatever it was.

  But Fat Man’s father had almost ruined everything. He did not own any of the ten-square-mile tract called Garden Hills, but he owned two acres adjoining it. And after the drilling and crushing and blasting, Jack O’Boylan’s men pointed to the two acres and said, “That’s the key.” For some reason that only geologists know, the ten square miles were not any good without the two acres. And the geologists made the mistake of being too anxious. They didn’t say they wanted to buy it; they said they had to buy it. How much did he want for it? And Fat Man’s father, who was not his father then or even married, sat in his one-room shack on his two acres, and rocked and spat through a crack in the floor and said his two acres were not for sale.

  But they were. Fat Man’s father had been raised on saw palmetto and sand. He understood robbery as well as the next man even though he had never had the chance to rob anybody. And since he did not know how much he could get for his two acres he just said they were not for sale.

  “Not for sale!” thundered Jack O’Boylan, when he was told. Knowing full well that everything is for sale, he told his secretary who told her secretary to telegraph his men to make an offer that could not be refused.