“Hey!” Arden had returned. “You decent?”
He just stood there in the downpour, wishing he’d had the sense to lock her out.
“Got somethin’ to show you. Just take a minute.”
The sooner he could get rid of her, the better. He turned off the water, found a towel to dry his hair, and walked into the front room. Arden was sitting in a chair at a round table next to the bed, a map spread out on the tabletop. She still wore her blue jeans, but she’d changed into a fresh beige short-sleeve blouse. “Wow,” she said, staring at him. “You really look beat.”
He reached back and massaged the cramped muscles of his shoulders. “I thought I locked that door before I went to sleep. How’d you get in?”
“I stood out there knockin’ till my knuckles were raw. You wouldn’t answer your phone, either. So I got an extra key from the lady at the front desk. I told her we were travelin’ together. Look here.”
“We’re not travelin’ together,” Dan said. He saw that what she’d spread out was his own Louisiana roadmap, taken from the station wagon.
“Here’s LaPierre. See?” She put her finger on a dot where Highway 57 ended at the swamp. “It’s about twenty-five miles south of Houma. Didn’t you say you were headed that way?”
“I don’t know. Did I?”
“Yes. You said you were goin’ somewhere south of Houma. Not a whole lot down there, from the looks of the map. Where’re you headed?”
He examined the map a little closer. LaPierre was maybe three miles past a town called Chandalac, which was four or five miles past Vermilion. South of LaPierre the map showed nothing but Terrebonne Parish swamp. “I’m not takin’ you any farther. You can catch a bus from here.”
“Yeah, I guess I could, but I figured since you were goin’ that way you’d help me —”
“No,” he interrupted. “It’s not possible.”
She frowned. “Not possible? Why not? You’re goin’ down there, aren’t you?”
“Listen, you don’t know me. I could be … somebody you wouldn’t want to be travelin’ with.”
“What’s that mean? You a bank robber or somethin’?”
Dan eased himself down on the bed again. “I’ll give you a ride to the bus station. That’s the best I can do.”
Arden sat there chewing her bottom lip and studying the map. Then she watched him for a moment as he wedged a pillow beneath his head and closed his eyes. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Depends,” he said.
“Somethin’ wrong with you? I mean … are you sick? You sure don’t look healthy, if you don’t mind my sayin’.”
Dan opened his eyes and peered up at the ceiling tiles. There was no point in trying to hide it. He said, “Yeah, I’m sick.”
“I thought so. What is it? AIDS?”
“Leukemia. Brain tumor. Worn out and at the end of my rope. Take your pick.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. He heard her folding the map up, or trying to, but road maps once unfolded became stubborn beasts. Arden cleared her throat. “The Bright Girl’s a healer. You heard Jupiter say that, didn’t you?”
“I heard an old man callin’ me Mr. Richards and talkin’ nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense!” she answered. “And you bear a resemblance to Mr. Richards. He had a beard and was about your size. I can see how Jupiter mistook you.”
Dan sat up again, his neck painfully tight, and looked at her. “Listen to me. The way I figure this, you’re tryin’ to track down a faith healer — who I don’t think even exists — to get that mark off your face. If you’re goin’ on the tall tales of some crazy old man, I think you’re gonna be real disappointed.”
“Jupiter’s not crazy, and they’re not tall tales. The Bright Girl’s down there. Just because you don’t believe it doesn’t make it not true.”
“And just because you want to believe it doesn’t make it true. I don’t know anything about you, or what you’ve been through, but seems to me you ought to be seein’ a skin doctor instead of tryin’ to find a faith healer.”
“I’ve seen dermatologists and plastic surgeons.” Arden said icily. “They all told me I’ve got the darkest port-wine stain they ever saw. They can’t promise me they can get it all off, or even half of it off without scarrin’ me up. I couldn’t afford the cost of the operations, anyway. And you’re right about not knowin’ anything about me. You sure as hell don’t know what it’s like to wear this thing on your face every day of your life. People lookin’ at you like you’re a freak, or some kind of monster not fit to be out in public. When somebody’s talkin’ to you, they’ll try to look everywhere but your face, and you can tell they’re either repulsed or they’re feelin’ pity for you. It’s a bad-luck sign, is what it is. My own father told me that when I was six years old. Then he left the house for a pack of cigarettes and kept on goin’, and my mama picked up a bottle and didn’t lay it down again until it killed her. From then on I was in and out of foster homes and I can tell you none of ’em were paradise.” She stopped speaking, her mouth tightening into a grim line.
“When I was fifteen,” Arden went on after a long pause, “I stole a car. Got caught and put on a ranch for ‘troubled youth’ outside San Antonio. Mr. Richards ran it. Jupiter worked at the stable, and his wife was a cook. It was a hard place, and if you stepped out of line you earned time in the sweat box. But I got my high school diploma and made it out. If I hadn’t I’d probably be dead or in prison by now. I used to help Jupiter with the horses, and he told me stories about the Bright Girl. How she could touch my birthmark and take it away. He told me where he’d grown up, and how everybody down there knew about the Bright Girl.” She paused again, her eyes narrowing as she viewed some distant scene inside her head. “Those stories … they were so real. So full of light and hope. That’s what I need right now. See, things haven’t been goin’ so good in my life. Lost my job at the Goodyear plant, they laid off almost a whole shift. Had to sell my car. My credit cards were gettin’ me in trouble, so I put the scissors to ’em. I went to apply for a job at a burger joint, and the fella took one look at my face and said the job was already filled and there wasn’t anything comin’ open anytime soon. Same thing happened with a couple of other jobs I went lookin’ for. I’m behind two months on my rent, and the bill collectors are barkin’ after me. See … what I need is a new start. I need to get rid of my bad luck once and for all. If I can find the Bright Girl and get this thing off my face … I could start all over again. That’s what I need, and that’s why I pulled every cent I’ve got out of the bank to make this trip. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, I do,” Dan said. “I know things are tough, but lookin’ for this Bright Girl person’s not gonna help you. If there ever was such a woman, she’s dead by now.” He met Arden’s blank stare. “Jupiter said the Bright Girl was livin’ in the swamp long before his daddy was a little boy. Right? So Jupiter said she came to LaPierre when he was a kid. He said she was a young and pretty white girl. Young, he said. Tell me how that can be.”
“I’ll tell you.” Arden finished refolding the map before she continued. “It’s because the Bright Girl never ages.”
“Oh, I see.” He nodded. “Not only is she a healer, she’s found the fountain of youth.”
“I didn’t say anything about the fountain of youth!” Anger lightened Arden’s eyes but turned the birthmark a shade darker. “I’m tellin’ you what Jupiter told me! The Bright Girl doesn’t ever get old, she always stays young and pretty!”
“And you believe this?”
“Yes! I do! I — I just do, that’s all!”
Dan couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. “Arden,” he said quietly, “you ever heard of somethin’ called folklore? Like stories about Johnny Appleseed, or Paul Bunyan, or … you know, people who’re bigger than life. Maybe a long, long time ago there was a faith healer who lived down in that swamp, and after she died she got bigger than life, too, because people didn’t want to l
et her go. So they made up these stories about her, and they passed ’em down to their children. That way she’d never die, and she’d always be young and pretty. See what I’m sayin’?”
“You don’t know!” she snapped. “Next thing you’ll be sayin’ Jesus was a made-up story, too!”
“Well, it’s your business if you want to go sloggin’ through a swamp lookin’ for a dead faith healer. I’m not gonna stop you.”
“Damn right you’re not!” Arden stood up, taking the map with her. “If I was as sick as you are, I’d be hopin’ I could find the Bright Girl, too, not sittin’ there denyin’ her!”
“One thing that’ll kill you real quick,” he said as she neared the door, “is false hope. You get a little older, you’ll understand that.”
“I hope I never get that old.”
“Hey,” Dan said before she could leave. “You want a ride to the bus station, I’ll be ready to go after dark.”
Arden hesitated with her hand on the doorknob. “How come you don’t want to go until dark?” She had to ask another question that had bothered her as well. “And how come you’re not even carryin’ a change of clothes?”
He thought fast. “Cooler after dark. I don’t want my radiator boilin’ over. And I’ve got friends where I’m goin’, I wasn’t plannin’ on stoppin’.”
“Uh-huh.”
He avoided her eyes because he feared she was starting to see through him. “I’m gonna take a shower and get some food. Not barbecue. You ought to call the bus station and find out where it is.”
“Even if I take a bus to Houma, I still have to get down to LaPierre somehow. Listen,” she said, determined to try again, “I’ll pay you thirty dollars to take me there. How about it?”
“No.”
“How much out of your way can it be?” Desperation had tightened her voice. “I can do some of the drivin’ for you. Besides, I’ve never been down in there before and … you know … a girl travelin’ alone could get into trouble. That’s why I paid Joey to drive me.”
“Yeah, he sure took good care of you, all right. I hope you get where you’re goin’, but I’m sorry. I can’t take you.”
She kept staring at him. Something mighty strange was going on, she thought. There was the broken glass in the back of the station wagon, the fact that he was traveling without even a toothbrush, and was it happenstance that he hadn’t awakened until a shrieking siren had gone past the motel? I could be somebody you wouldn’t want to be travelin’ with, he’d said. What did that mean?
She was making him nervous. He stood up and pulled off his T-shirt. She could see the outline of every rib under his pale skin. “You want to watch me get naked and take a shower, that’s fine with me,” Dan said. He began unbuckling the belt of his jeans.
“Okay, I’m leavin’,” she decided when he pushed down his zipper. “My room’s right next door, when you get ready.” She retreated, and Dan closed the door in her face and turned the latch.
He breathed a sigh of relief. She was starting to wonder about him, that much was clear. He knew he should never have given her a ride; she was a complication he didn’t need. But right now there was nothing to be done but take his shower and try to relax, if he could. Get some food, that would make him feel a whole lot better. He started for the bathroom, but before he got there, curiosity snared him and he turned on the TV and clicked through the channels in search of a local newscast. He found CNN, but it was the financial segment. He switched the set off. Then, after a few seconds of internal debate, he turned it back on again. Surely he wouldn’t have made the national news, but a local broadcast might come on at five and he’d find out if Lafayette had picked up the story. He felt as grimy as a mudflap at a tractor pull, and he went into the bathroom and cranked the shower taps to full blast.
Arden had gone to the office to return the extra key. The small-boned, grandmotherly woman behind the registration desk looked up over her eyeglasses from working a crossword puzzle in the Lafayette newspaper. “Your friend all right?”
“Yeah, he is. He was just extra tired, didn’t hear me knockin’.” She laid the key down on the desk. “Could you tell me how to get to the bus station from here?”
“Got a phone book, I’ll look up the address.” The woman reached a vein-ridged hand into a drawer for the directory. “Where you plannin’ on goin’?”
“To Houma, first. Then on down south.”
“Ain’t much south of Houma but the bayou. You got relatives down there?”
“No, I’m on my own.”
“On your own? What about your friend?”
“He’s … goin’ somewhere else.”
“Lord, I wouldn’t go down in that swamp country by myself, that’s for gospel!” The woman had her finger on the bus station’s address, but first she felt bound to deliver a warning. “All kinda roughnecks and heathens livin’ down there, they don’t answer to no law but their own. Look right here.” She picked up the newspaper’s front page and thrust it at Arden. “Headline up top, ’bout the ranger. See it?”
Arden did. It said Terrebonne Ranger Still Missing, and beneath that was a smaller line of type that said Son of Lafayette Councilman Giradoux. A photograph showed a husky, steely-eyed young man wearing a police uniform and a broad-brimmed hat.
“Missin’ since Tuesday,” the woman told Arden. “Been the big news here all week. He went down in that swamp one too many times, is what he did. Swallowed him up, you can bet on it.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Arden said, “but it’s not gonna stop me from —” And then she did stop, because her gaze had gone to a story at the bottom of the page and a headline that read Second Murder Attributed to Shreveport Fugitive. A photograph was included with this story, too, and the bearded face in it made Arden’s heart freeze.
It wasn’t the best quality picture, but he was recognizable. It looked like a mug shot, or a poorly lit snapshot for a driver’s license. He was bare headed and unsmiling, and he’d lost twenty pounds or more since the camera had caught him. Beneath the picture was his name: Daniel Lewis Lambert.
“They found his boat,” the woman said.
“Huh?” Arden looked up, her insides quaking.
“Jack Giradoux’s boat. They found it, but there wasn’t hide nor hair of him. I know his folks. They eat breakfast every Saturday mornin’ at the Shoneys down the road. They thought that boy hung the moon, and they’re gonna take it awful hard.”
Arden returned to reading the story. “I’d be mighty careful in that swamp country,” the woman urged. “It’s bad people can make a parish ranger disappear.” She busied herself writing the bus station’s address down on a piece of notepad paper.
Arden felt close to passing out as she realized what kind of man Dan Farrow — no, Dan Lambert — really was. Vietnam veteran, had the tattoo of a snake on his right forearm. Shot and killed the loan manager at a bank in Shreveport. Shot and beat to death a man at a motel outside Alexandria and stole his station wagon. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
“Pardon?” The woman lifted her silver eyebrows.
Arden said, “This man. He’s —” … the man God sent Miz Arden.
Jupiter had said it. You the man God provided to take Miz Arden to the Bright Girl. You His hands, you gone have to steer her the right direction.
No, Dan Lambert was a killer. This newspaper said so. He’d killed two people, so what was to stop him from killing her if he wanted to? But he was sick, anybody could look at him and tell that. If he wanted to kill her, why hadn’t he just pulled off the highway before they’d reached Lafayette?
“You say somethin’?” the woman asked.
“I … yeah. I mean … I’m not sure.”
“Not sure? About what?”
Arden stared at the photograph. The man God sent. She’d wanted to believe that very badly. That there was some cosmic order of things, some undercurrent in motion that had brought her to this time and place. But if Jupiter had been so wrong, then what did t
hat say about his belief in the Bright Girl?
She felt something crumbling inside her, and she feared that when it fell away she would have nothing left to hold her together.
“You still want the address?”
“What?”
“The bus station. You want me to tell you how to get there? It’s not far.”
The walls were closing in on her. She had to get out of there, had to find a place to think. “Can I take this?” She held the newspaper’s page so the woman couldn’t see Dan’s picture.
“Sure, I’m through with it. Don’t you want the —”
Arden was already going out the door.
“Guess not,” the woman said when the door closed. She’d wanted to ask the girl if that mark on her face hurt, but she’d decided that wouldn’t be proper. It was a shame; that girl would’ve been so pretty if she weren’t disfigured. But that was life, wasn’t it? You had to take the bad with the good, and make the best of it. Still, it was a terrible shame.
She turned her attention again to the crossword puzzle. The next word across was four letters, and its clue was “destiny.”
15
The Truth
DAN HAD STEPPED OUT OF the shower and was toweling off when he heard someone speak his name. He looked at the television set. His face — his driver’s license picture — was looking back at him from the screen. He thought he’d been prepared for the shock, but he was wrong; in that instant he felt as if he’d simultaneously taken a gut punch and had icy water poured on the back of his neck. The newscaster was talking about the shooting of Emory Blanchard, and the camera showed scenes of policemen at the First Commercial Bank. And then the vision truly became nightmarish, because suddenly a distraught face framed with kinky red curls was talking into a reporter’s microphone.
Gone South Page 21