Ronald, Simon, Rosemary and Ed 1949

At nine years of age, Ronald Shepard held in his hands a blue jar, and in the jar was a fetus. Beneath the dusty glow of the bare fruit cellar bulb, Ronald mistook the fetus for a tadpole, a pollywog, and, had his mother not restrained him, he would have run for his fishing rod to skewer the newt on a number six hook. But Rosemary Shepard explained to her son that this was not bait for a hungry sea bass, this was a fetus, his brother. She had saved it for him in a blue Ball-Mason jar filled with alcohol.

Ronald named the fetus Ricardo.

In 1949, nine-year-old Ronald Shepard lived with his mother and father and their employer, the millionaire Simon Rice, on a small island off the coast of South Carolina. This island, which Rice had earlier christened Xanadu because it represented for him an escape, a retreat from what he foresaw as a sunless marriage and stultifying future as a scion of Beacon Hill, was more or less elliptical in shape, with a total circumference of approximately two miles. On sea maps it was listed anonymously as one of the six La Chére Islands, those corks of sand and swamp named for the French sailor who, near the end of the 16th century, had been marooned there, then rescued, then eaten by his rescuers. It was the same island on which the pirates Edward Blackbeard Teach and Charles Vance once held a month-long orgy of rum and music and women, during which time, for the pirates' amusement, captive females were raped and strangled, flaming pitch was poured into prisoners' mouths, and at least one unlucky fellow was made to dine on his own ears.

Despite its history of cannibalism and piracy, or perhaps because of it, Xanadu appealed to Simon Rice as the largest and northernmost of the La Chére Islands and as the one closest to the mainland, a mere four miles across tepid Atlantic waters from the batteries of Fort Sumter. Here Rice drained all but a portion of the cypress swamp. He tamed moss-covered gum trees and loblolly pines. He built a three-story yellow Victorian house complete with cupola and widow's walk, from which vantage points he might survey the sea and the heavens and contemplate the distant machinations of his fellow man. An adjacent servants' cottage was also constructed, and this the Shepard family was given as their home.

On his island Rice planted azaleas and camellias to bloom in the Spring; hibiscus, oleanders, magnolias and hydrangeas to brighten the summer. Around the perimeter of the island he carved a road paved with seashells, then ordered a new black Packard Super Clipper ferried from the mainland. He ripped out clumps of sea grass, tore down muscadine vines, extracted palmettos and scrubby blackjack pines. He graded and filled, he knocked down and built. When finished, he could stand in the front doorway of his mansion and see, where once were only tangled weeds and rocks and gecko trails, a hand-raked beach of sugary sand, a boathouse, a paradise, a three-acre croquet lawn with grass as smooth as felt.

Here Ronald Shepard was born and grew. Here he watched the waves, the sand and the sky, and in their changing configurations he saw nine years come and float past and softly go. In the summer of 1949, before his first meeting with the fetus Ricardo, Ronald welcomed each sunny morning by playing croquet with Simon Rice, by banging striped balls through the dewy grass, or by strolling the beach for interesting pieces of shell or fresh marine corpses, or by watching the sun transmute from red to orange to foundry gold. In any case he welcomed each morning with the innocence of the child he was,

a creature who would not believe nor even imagine that a man could chew on another man's bones, that betrayal was as common in the world beyond Xanadu as were the shiny silver dollars that jangled in his pockets, or that misery lapped against the shores of the planet as routinely as the undertow that nightly swept the sand from the beach of his own private playground.

Ronald's mother, who was Rice's housekeeper and cook, liked nothing better on these sunny mornings than to step from the heat of her kitchen and onto the rear porch and there to gaze upon her son at play. She had few pleasures in life, and in fact if pressed she could have named only two, both personified by the sight of Ronald's skinny butt in madras shorts or swim trunks, his knees sticking out like bronze doorknobs as he squatted to whack a croquet ball between his legs while his mentor Simon Rice stood tall and straight in the background, a proud smile framed against a sapphire sky.

Ronald's father, Ed Shepard, would also sometimes pause during his work to regard his son and the millionaire at play. During a break from polishing the Packard Super Clipper or trimming the hedge or raking the seashell driveway, Ed would feel a marble of ice chilling his gut. Eventually this marble would tumble down his small intestine, clanking round and round until it found a secret passage into his scrotum. And there it would lie, vibrating, its searing chill shrinking Ed's penis and rattling his testicles like dice in a metal cup.

Ronald, for his part, had everything a boy could ask of youth. After a vigorous round of croquet on a summer morning, he and thirty-three year old Simon Rice would plunge into the ocean, splashing and diving, riding the waves. Later they might don snorkeling gear and wade like herons across the coral reefs, jabbing their spears into an itinerant bonita or a hapless crustacean. Their bodies were sleek and sinewy and brown, their hair bleached as blond as the beach sand, as golden pale as the halo of hair illuminating the face of Marilyn Monroe, who was a budding starlet at the time. In the evening Ronald's mother would fillet their bonita or Newburg their lobster. Ronald would dine at the master's table while Rosemary and Ed took their dinner in the kitchen.

Simon taught the boy everything he needed to know about good table manners. He taught him to take small bites, to chew with his mouth closed, to keep his elbows off the table. He taught him the difference between a cocktail fork and a salad fork, how to wield his cutlery in the continental fashion, where to place his butter knife when it was not in service, and how to spit out an olive pit without actually spitting.

At the close of each evening meal, after a last sip of coffee, Simon would gaze across the long cherrywood table and ask the boy, "Well, sir? Are you ready?"

Sucking in his gut, Ronald would throw back his shoulders, then answer solemnly, "Ready."

"The usual wager, then?"

"Yes, sir. The usual."

"Very well then. The bet is one silver dollar, winner take all. You, sir, may fire at will."

Whereupon the millionaire playboy and his protégé would attempt to outbelch one another. Invariably, Simon won. His belch was a resonant baritone; Ronald's was still soprano.

Ronald loved Simon Rice and gladly forked over the silver dollar. It was no great sacrifice, for Simon presented the boy with two shiny coins every morning. "It is important for a man to have his own resources," Simon often told him. "Not that happiness can be bought, that's not the point." Ronald would wait then for the punch line, for that moment when, after a predictable five-second pause, Simon's mouth would curl into a smile and he would add, with Ronald singing in unison, "But at least you can make a down payment on it!"

On those few days each month when Simon left the island to confer with a broker or to visit one of his many business interests, Ronald felt lost and alone and had little appetite for play until Simon returned. Much of that time he spent with his mother, learning how to whip up a meringue or a béarnaise sauce, or listening to the Victrola, or staying out of his father's way. The rest of the time he stood alone atop the widow's walk, scouring the channel for a glimpse of Simon's cabin cruiser, the Dulcinea, and jangling the heavy coins in his pockets, the ballast that kept him feeling balanced and substantial.

Simon's brief absences, then, were the only mosquitoes in the honey of Ronald's happiness. Ronald was, throughout most of the summer of 1949, moronically happy. His happiness was a direct result of his ignorance. In other parts of the world, a nine-year-old boy might already be familiar with deprivation and danger, might be intimate with the myriad faces of dread and the skeletons of death that dance and clatter through the night. But on Xanadu the air smelled of oranges and magnolia and the sea sang a hymn of fertility and even the barren moon seemed somehow benign, as if darkness illuminated rather than concealed. As if the mysteries of space and sea were each and every a joy waiting to be discovered. As if a planet or person so beautiful on the surface could never be hollow and wind-seared within.

Ginger 2018

Approximately seventy years later and three thousand miles west of Xanadu, sixteen-year-old Ginger Todd was enjoying her youth far less than Ronald had enjoyed most of his. Despite her physical beauty, her blond hair and soft full curves and the sultry pout of vulnerability modeled after that of a long-dead actress enjoying yet another resurgence of popularity, Ginger Todd was an unhappy young woman.

Her discontent had begun long before the year 2018, however, by which time, at what should have been a girl's most buttery and giddious age, she was thoroughly disgusted not only with her past but also with those few possibilities she could discern in the future. Her adoptive parents, Carl and Valerie Todd, attributed much of Ginger's malaise to her inauspicious entry into the world. Like many Americans of the third millennium, they saw no reason to hold themselves responsible for their charge's distemper and placed the blame on a germ foreign and separate from any they might have carried, in this case a condition called fetal alcohol syndrome, a predisposing condition whose symptoms range from severe retardation and physical anomalies to mere belligerence and antisocial behavior.

Ginger, they reasoned, was an unhappy child through no fault of their own. Ginger had been born drunk.

Riding in the sloppy hammock of her mother's womb, Ginger had subsisted on a prenatal diet comprised largely of recycled Old Grand-Dad bonded whiskey. She had sucked it up through her umbilical straw. As a consequence, Ginger's initial impression of the outside world was of a place that would not stand still, of blinking lights swimming round and round, of faces and sounds roaring in and out of focus.

Nor did the process of alcohol withdrawal contribute much to her sense of well-being. Ginger's tiny body rattled with spasms. She choked and vomited and screamed and wailed and nearly died a hundred times. At the hospital in Flagstaff, Arizona where she was born, nurses fretted and prayed over Ginger every morning, noon and night. Obstetricians, pediatricians, radiologists, candy stripers, orderlies, and even the night shift janitor rallied around the beautiful blond infant and urged her to survive.

Ginger's mother, meanwhile, wrestled noisily with her own delirium tremens while the director of social services sought an injunction to have her declared an unfit mother. The injunction was easily won, facilitated by the vociferous disdain Ginger's mother, Cassandra DeRoy, espoused for the very notion of motherhood. Baby Ginger was placed in a foster home, Cassandra DeRoy disappeared, and Ginger was later adopted by her foster parents, Carl and Valerie Todd.

Ginger's first years were uneventful and not unpleasant. Her most vivid recollection of those early years was of a warm September afternoon in 2006, when she was barely five. Having a few minutes earlier finished her lunch, a peanut butter and banana sandwich on honey-wheat foccacio, Ginger was lying on her stomach through the tire swing in her backyard, watching with vague interest as a platoon of black ants converged upon the bread crumbs she had dropped for them. Suddenly, the ants began to dance. They hopped and shook and twirled, they played leap-ant, they bowed and curtsied. Soon Ginger noticed that she too was moving, the swing swinging of its own volition, the tree shaking like an arthritic blind man trying to swat a bee.

Nauseated and disoriented, fearing that she had slipped into a nightmare of motion sickness from a time long, long ago, Ginger looked up. The western edge of the sky was a sickly yellow. She crawled out of the tire swing and staggered into the house, her shoes slick with vomit, and there joined her parents sitting mesmerized and hunched in front of the television screen, watching the quad-screen images of breaking news.

Helicopters hovering over Los Angeles and San Diego and San Francisco were beaming pictures all across the world to explain the sudden pallor of the western sky. Young Ginger, along with millions of others, watched in fascinated horror as streets and highways buckled and cracked, as expensive homes slid from their roosts on sandy cliffs, as the ocean bubbled and the earth burst its seams and even docile mountains belched.

Ginger saw a tugboat in Oakland Bay swirl and disappear like a tiny toy sucked down the bathtub drain. She saw people hop and shake and twirl, run this way and that, fall and slide, scurry and crawl, dive awkwardly off blazing skyscraper roofs. She saw a beautiful estate in the Hollywood Hills, a place the newsman called Xanadu Two, quietly implode and then burst into flames. She heard another newsman weeping, she heard him gasp, she heard him begin to cough as a plume of smoke rose up to engulf and shake his helicopter, and then she heard the pilot's garbled shriek and saw the camera image tilting sideways, swinging from left to right, panning up and down as the helicopter spiraled toward the earth, in and out of a pink-gray smoke. Just a moment before that image went black, she saw the Golden Gate Bridge do a loop-de-loop.

Copyright © 2003 by Randall Silvis