The Thomas Berryman Number

I didn’t see a good reason to hold anything back, so I told her most of what I knew. She listened to it all, and then she simply laughed.

“He’s crazy, you know. Tuned out.”

“He said you know what happened in Nashville,” I told her.

“He said?” she stopped walking and turned to me. “Or are you figuring things out by yourself, Mr. Jones?”

She drifted away without an answer. Over closer to the water so it ran up over her feet. Her toes were long and bony with spots of red polish on the nails. And she

was

outrageously attractive.

When we finally reached a point out of sight of the house she plopped down in the sand. “Lili Marlene” came on her radio and she turned it up full.

“I feel very … like wind and things can pass right through me. It’s very weird talking to you right now. Unreal,” she said with a big sigh.

I asked her if Berryman was around somewhere and she gave no answer.

And then for some reason (I wasn’t able to understand it until I’d gathered more information) Oona Quinn began to tell me little things about herself. She spoke cautiously at first. In a cynical, irreverent sort of way. But after a while I started to get the feeling that I was hearing a nervous, maybe even a contrite confession. I also got the feeling that the girl was scared and confused.

She and I spent nearly three days together in Thomas Berryman’s house, and she spoke more and more freely (I thought) about what had happened between herself and Berryman.

One time she called him “the master of good vibes.” She said that he had a ten-inch prick, if that question was circulating around my mind. And she also said that I tended to be gloomy.

All in all it was a crazy environment for me. For one thing, I’d never spent a lot of time with beautiful women before; for another, the only other time I’d been at the seashore was in Biloxi, Mississippi. I also had trouble sleeping. At night, it got cold as Tennessee winter out there.

During our second day go-round, Oona told me that Bert Poole hadn’t shot Jimmie Horn.

“Ben Toy told me the same thing,” I said.

“He doesn’t know.” She disputed that. “He thinks Tom’s going to come take him back to Texas in the Mercedes.”

The back porch ran along the entire length of the house, and that was where we usually talked. We would sit on wicker porch furniture, facing out at the ocean. Thinking about it now, I can remember her bony, wool-socked toes wiggling in and out of leather clogs. It was her nervous tic, she said.

More often than not, a khaki-uniformed gardener would be working on the lawns as we taped.

A rangy, suspicious Jamaican, he thought I was getting into Oona’s pants behind Berryman’s back. He was fiercely loyal to Thomas Berryman, and said it was none of my damn business how come, mon.

One afternoon I noticed Oona handing the man several twenty-dollar bills. It gave me the uncomfortable feeling that Berryman was somewhere close by, supervising, maybe watching us from the mountainous dunes all around his house.

For her part, Oona Quinn would shrink up all vulnerable and wallflower-like whenever we talked. She’d sit on her long legs, hugging herself. She’d rock, and the wicker chair and porch would creak in unison.

She’d be very much in control, even haughty, until I pulled the tape recorder from its leather case. But something about the tape recorder got to her. Something about having her words recorded put a big, hard lump in her throat.

She was a lively storyteller though; she had a natural sense for ironic detail. I thought, in fact, that she was feeling ironic about herself, and I hoped to use that to get closer to Thomas Berryman.

Hampton Bays, June 18

Under a fat red sun, Thomas Berryman straddled the roof of his sea captain’s house and watched down where whitecaps were breaking all over a rough, stony Atlantic Ocean. The high air was clean, thick with salt, blue to look at. It was late June now.

Working at about fifty percent consciousness, Berryman’s mind kept drifting back to sugary Sunday school scenes from Texas. He wondered what was becoming of himself.

After a while, his eyes focused on a small piece of tar patchwork he’d completed, and he thought it was good work to patch your own roof. His gardener had refused to do the high roofing job, and now Berryman was pleased.

He looked over at sand dunes—rising fifty or sixty feet on the other side of the highway—and his eyes followed a white Mustang tooling along the pigeon-gray road at their base. The Mustang scampered away between the sand hills like a cartoon car. At one time, Berryman remembered, he’d threatened his father with bodily harm over the issue of a Ford Mustang.

He lit a rare cigarette and let himself float in warm, afternoon sensations. He could see Oona walking down on the beach in a white string suit. Very chic-chic. Now and again his mind drifted to the subject of Jimmie Horn.

He shimmied over to the dark stone (cool) chimney, and began to install a new screen over its big mouth.