The Gendarme

by Mark T. Mustian

  It seems I do. Calmly, deliberately, my clothing regained in an adjacent bathroom, I put my plan into action.

  19

  The bike is there, black helmet on black handlebars. After pretending to need the restroom, I have walked out the side door, turned, and hurried around the building’s back drive. There—between dumpster and barn-shaped shed—I strap on the helmet, swing into the seat, take one dizzying step, and am off, grunting against the chain’s resistance. I am unsteady, even after having ridden all those years. I am an old man now. Slowly I pass the cedars and crepe myrtles, gathering speed, into the parking lot, out and away. I am free.

  No one shouts at my exit, no horns beep or wail. I swing onto the sidewalk at Graham Avenue, back in the direction of town, my legs pumping, my breath shortened already. I imagine for a moment the scene at the oncology center, the searching, the realization, Royce on the phone, Nurse Claire frowning. A plume of guilt wraps my abdomen, broken by joy at the thought of escape. I am Steve McQueen—no, the big man whose name I forget. I am America. I pedal faster, the air whipping my face, down Barton Street and its homes in shiny siding, past the Full Abundance Christian Center Full Gospel Church, past the school, the bike bumping against blocks of sidewalk stained mineral orange, out into the bustle of Jackson Street. Still no one follows, no police cars, no vans. I glance at the traffic. Sweat drips from my chin, fountainlike.

  I pause on the opposite sidewalk, gauging directions. Despite my forty years here, the address I have scrawled is unfamiliar. Is this West Jackson? I press on, what I believe to be south and west, my legs burning, my breath noisy and ragged, sweat stinging my eyes as it slips down my face. Lights flutter, street numbers dance, ones becoming sevens, twos threes, sixes nines—are there cars behind me? Past the State Department of Corrections’ Wadesboro Diversion Center, across a tangle of railroad tracks with lights like dual sentinels, past the Texaco station and its patched asphalt, along the neon-fronted Pic ’n Save, until I find the tiny sign painted red, white, and blue—the picture of a streaking canine. The Greyhound station. The home, as Carl says, of the gray dog.

  The station has been formed from the remnants of a convenience store and gas station. Three lone plastic chairs, one red, one yellow, one off-white—the type seen in actual bus terminals—have been placed in the island where the gas pumps once stood. Weeds sprout in clumps in the concrete, below a single, curved lamppost unexpectedly tilting upward. Beyond the building is a tree surrounded by weeds six feet or higher. Yellow paint flakes from metal shingles, some rusty in the sun.

  A bus pulls up, lights blinking, smoke billowing; it makes a wide turn and stops short of the building. An elderly black woman and a young man disembark. I pull the bike to the side of the building, near a fenced-off shed that might once have housed produce. I expect a car to pull up alongside, blocking any exit, but there is nothing. My mind is clear. I hurry to the office, wiping sweat with my hands.

  Several people stand before a cluttered desk, behind which sits an elderly woman with white hair and browned glasses. The room smells of ashes and dead smoke. A window air conditioner strains against the afternoon heat. The others in front of me—an old man leaning on a cane, a black woman with her hair in diagonals—form a line reminiscent of the queue for dinner or medicine at SGPC. The woman behind the desk pecks at a computer keyboard, mutters to herself, pecks some more.

  “That’ll be forty-five dollars,” she announces in a husky voice. The old man switches hands on his cane, digs in a pocket for crumpled bills.

  I glance at my watch, at the bus waiting outside, at people now milling around it—perhaps they have tickets already? I shift from one foot to the other. The woman in front of me poses one question, then another (Now, can you reach New Orleans without going to Tallahassee? Where is the best place to get dinner? Is it cheaper to come back Tuesday instead of Wednesday?), each met with an expansive, time-consuming response (No, she must go through Tallahassee. The food is best in Mobile.). I shift again, watch as luggage is loaded. Surely this bus will not leave with me standing in line.

  The women finally reach an agreement, a fifty-five-dollar fare in which the purchaser first tries to use a credit card, then a check, and in the end produces cash from a faded coin purse. A ticket spits from a machine. Luggage doors clang. Surely the police are here now.

  “I need to go to New York.” The woman in front of me has not fully moved yet, still groping for something in a massive black purse.

  “Okay, honey. You want to go today?”

  “Yes. Now, please.” The other woman eyes me, moves slowly out of the way.

  “When you comin’ back?”

  “Oh, Tuesday.”

  “Okay.” More pecks on the keyboard. She draws a labored breath.

  “I can get you there in twenty hours—you’ll arrive about twelve-thirty tomorrow afternoon. You’ll change buses in Tallahassee, Jacksonville, and Charlotte. South for a few minutes, east, and then north.”

  “Yes. Can I take this bus?” I point outside.

  She glances out the window, as if unaware of a bus nearing departure. “Sure, honey. You can take that bus. What’s your name?”

  I pause. “John Paul Edmonds.”

  “Edmonds. Is that with a u or an o?”

  “Um . . .” I am a poor liar. “O.”

  More pecks, the laboring of the printer. “Okay, hon. That’ll be ninety-one dollars.”

  I bring out my wallet and hand her the money. She smiles a brown smile.

  “Thanks, hon. Have a good trip.”

  I leave the small office, my shirt stained and wet, the dampness turning to cold down my back and legs. I duck my head, checking again for pursuers, but there is only the bus driver, an aged man with a mustache twirled into points, and several large women whose backsides swing as they mount the grooved steps.

  “Any luggage?” The mustache bobs up and down.

  I shake my head. Inside, the bus is fuller than I expect, though I see empty seats in the back. I keep my head down as I edge down the aisle, the smell of the rear toilet mixed with perfume and stale chips. Blasts of cold air-conditioning increase my discomfort. Snippets of conversation make their way forward: “. . . yeah, then they had to just sew up my rectum . . .” “. . . well, she said she was Jesus . . .” About two-thirds of the way back I see her, despite my attempt to look past. Worse, she sees me.

  “Uncle Emmett!”

  I slide into a seat. Josephine rises, edges with difficulty past the woman beside her, slips back and plops into the seat in front of me, her arm curled over its top. Brainsetta.

  “Hey! ”

  I force myself to look, willing my face to show friendliness.

  “Where’re you going?” Tiny hairs glint at the corners of her mouth.

  “Ah . . . Tampa. They are sending me for more treatment.” I wipe again at my face. “And you?”

  “Oh, we’re going to a rodeo.” She waves a meaty hand at several women nearby, some of whom nod and grin. “Near Houston.”

  “I see. A rodeo.”

  She leans forward. “It’s the finals. The national ostrich-roping finals.” She lifts a plucked eyebrow.

  I stare at her. I glance at her associates.

  “Ostriches?”

  “They say it might become an Olympic sport. I’ve been in training for months.”

  I rub my face. Josephine leans farther over. “So, what treatment are you having?”

  “Some different radiation. An experimental-type thing.”

  She nods sympathetically. The doors to the bus close, a swirl of piston and hinge. The motor rumbles. Air brakes release.

  She looks forward. “I guess I’d better get back to my seat.” She smoothes the bulge of her hair. “It’s great to see you. Hey, did you hear about Peter’s grant? Isn’t that unbelievable? Five million dollars. I’m still on a cloud.”

  “Unbelievable. Yes.” I smile against a new gust of air. “Good-bye.”

  “Bye! ”

&n
bsp; She twists away. The bus pulls back from the makeshift station. I search again for sign of the police. I am shaking, confused. Is my confinement not known, by Josephine as well as the others? Did Peter not share my request? The questions trigger more questions, slipping me into the ether, in which one thing becomes another. I am an escapee, mental patient, dreamer, widower, father, grandfather, gendarme. Is there more? I should have been dead long ago. I am a stranger here. I am a murderer. Even now others stare, their lips pursed in accusation. Someone brandishes a portable phone—will they not call back to Wadesboro? Josephine and Peter, Brains and Brainsetta—by combining their tiny minds they must know. The police will check the bus logs, find the ticket to New York, uncover the assumed name. Lawrence has the address. The world’s oldest escapee! Violet will be there, side by side with orange-clad HSTs; doors will slam, metal cages swing shut. They will beat me to New York, they will find her. And I will be lost.

  I make my way to the restroom, enter, and set the latch. My pants are sodden, my skin bumpy like chicken flesh. I sit on the tiny toilet seat, the stench of disinfectant alive in my nostrils, the bus swaying and rocking. Someone knocks on the door. It must be the police, I think—this American efficiency! I stand and bump my head, searching with my hands for some other way out, but the room is tight, like a coffin. A muffled voice from the door (“Are you okay in there?”) finally brings me to open it, to peer out in paranoia at a spindly old woman who gazes back through thick glasses and asks loudly, “Are you done yet?” I go back then to my seat, my hands on my arms, shivering with such intensity that my muscles begin to twitch in their own halting rhythm: murderer, murderer. Murderer.

  We reach Tallahassee and file off the bus. Outside, a porter pulls luggage. I skirt the group, waiting, my eye out for HSTs or Violet or anyone else, but there is no one, only grimy walls and muttering people and the smell of rancid grease from the door leading inside. Petrified dollops of gum spot gray asphalt. A sign welcomes us to Tallahassee, the Capital City, the sign’s end bent and smudged. A uniformed policeman leans against a far wall, his head turned away from the metal chair in which I sit to stare at a blank, coin-operated TV. I place my head in my hands, convinced that even a glimpse of my guilty face will betray me, but then the shivering starts anew, becoming so severe that in a panic I stand and make for the snack bar, past video games and a Greyhound-topped gum dispenser, out a side door, and onto the sidewalk. There, only inches from streaming traffic, I change my plan. I must confuse and outwit them, as is done in the movies. I must vary my means of escape. A battered-face man bars my way but I step around him, ignore his request for a cigarette, edge down the street to the side of the building. A yellow taxi waits at the corner.

  “Hey! ”

  I turn in resignation, captured at last. But it is only Josephine, hurrying down the sidewalk in a curious, crablike waddle. She pulls up alongside, her face bent and flushed, gasping for breath in a back-bending heave.

  “Our bus is leaving. I just wanted to say bye.”

  She grasps me in an awkward hug, her neck bent forward to avoid crushing my chest. Beyond, on a marquee across the street, the words “free trans check” float above her.

  “Good luck,” she says.

  She says this as she says all things, her mouth in U-lines; she is Brainsetta, but she is more. Her eyes gleam with a sly recognition. She knows. I am silent. So foreign, this relative, of Carol’s, not mine, thrust upon me as had been Georgia, so absurd in her mannerisms. And now kindness, when I have shown her contempt. She knows. Not much, but she knows, and keeps silent.

  “Thank you,” I respond.

  “You’re welcome.” She turns back down the sidewalk. A car barrels just past. I stare after her, thinking of fate, of providence. What if Araxie had been in another caravan? What if Carol had been assigned to a different ward? What if the British had left me, had not mistaken me for one of their own? The things that changed the course of my life—the war, the deportations, the injury—all carrying me with them like a seed in the wind. The deaths. America, working. Violet, and Lissette . . .

  I find myself in the taxi. I glance around.

  “The airport. Take me, please.”

  The driver grunts. The door slams, the steering wheel turns. Tallahassee races past—bricked and porticoed—to the accompaniment of the driver’s snorts, as if the sights deserve derision but fall short of speech. His seat shifts, its beaded back like an abacus. Smells of mildew and marijuana rise. His chin is large like a whale’s, reminding me of something I cannot quite place, twirling me back to the dream, to her, to memories now muddled, of the klimbim, the fight, the men who detained me. Do I remember their faces? I strain, in my memory—I cannot lose these things found! But it is useless, this straining, one either remembers or does not. A door opens or closes. I learned this long ago.

  A grunt sounds before me, a meter clicks over. The taxi, the whale-man. Is he mute? We have arrived. He speaks then, a hoarse “Thanks, buddy” as I transfer crumpled bills to a wide, dirty hand.

  The terminal is crowded, the fissures in my new plan quickly exposed. There is, of course, no direct flight from Tallahassee to New York, and my other options are through either Charlotte or Atlanta. The Charlotte flight arrives too late for me to make any connection to New York until morning. The Atlanta evening flight is sold out. I hesitate a shaky moment, then opt for Charlotte, determined at least to get closer. I hand over my driver’s license, establish a record with my name, not any other. This will be checked, found. I am doomed. Yet determined.

  I sleep on the flight, my stomach tightened in worry. I have flown only three times before in my life. My head slips in sleep, startling me into drool-filled awakenings, to a strange sense of motionlessness, as if we are characters in a play, only pretending to fly. I think of The High and the Mighty, but then I dream, in stray threads: of my hands at a throat (Mustafa’s? John Paul’s?); and then of home, with Lissette; with Wilfred, a baby. These stay with me, even after we reach the chaos of the Charlotte airport, in a spiral of such longing that I make for a bank of pay phones, hands trembling, and sit for some time. Calling cards, long distance—I do not understand these, or the woman who enters my ear and asks with impatience, “What is it you want?” But I am connected, finally, through a series of clicks.

  “Hello?” Violet’s voice carries through, light and familiar. “Hello?”

  I wait for the phone woman—must she not approve this? There is silence. I am thinking, pleading, but I can say nothing. My voice is contained. I only breathe, some part of me hoping the sound itself provides comfort.

  “Papa?”

  Only silence.

  “Pap-o?”

  The phrase she used as a child, as lips formed, words came. Pap-o. I hear the break in her voice. But I am silenced, looking back from the grave. Is it not better—yes, best—that I go now? I must go. My hand replaces the phone in its cradle, banishing her voice back to nothingness, air. I stare at the phone and its hard plastic handle, the residue of makeup caught and held in its cracks. I remember Carol in the years near her death, calling strangers at odd hours. Just to hear voices, she said, when she no longer heard mine.

  I rise, after a time, a small headache brewing. Travelers stream past. Some look my way and I think of SGPC, of escape. Paranoia slips back, the fear that waiting will bring capture, and soon I find myself at the Hertz counter, exposing my ID, signing papers, scanning a map for the route to New York. It is almost ten o’clock at night by the time I reach the car, my head now throbbing, the pain in my vision like spots on a cloud. I have difficulty locating the knob for the headlights—I must search for this. Then I exit. Am I still at the airport? But I find my way, somehow. Lights fade behind me.

  I drive in silence, stopping only once for aspirin I suck straight from the canister. I am alone, abandoned. I am free. The car is strange and quiet, but I am careful. My mind clears and calms. I will find her. Memories come, too, spilling about, overlapping: Carol at the beach,
a snatch of song from the forties. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Sequential no longer, more like splatters of paint. I remember a compliment from a customer who loved his new toilet (“It is like a Roman fountain!”), the smells of diesel and sulfur. My first ride on a subway, the clacking and rocking and disorientation. And then further back: the taste of döner, of rakı. The noise a hammer makes as it falls on heated metal. I hold them, these memories, as I bring forth obscured others. Are there connections? There are absences. The childhood I constructed for myself, gone now like a used shell. The life I made here, my American life. So many people—how many people met in a lifetime, a long lifetime? And then her.

  I drive on. I stop at a motel outside Baltimore, a neon-riddled establishment labeled the Starlight, its carport fronted by a half-zipper façade. I am surprised at the time; it is four in the morning. I have been driving for—what?—almost six hours? Memories and thoughts and the headache shield time. I check my watch again, check the clock behind the desk. Four a.m. The clerk, a sallow-faced girl with too much eye shadow and a ring in her lip, takes my money (nearly the last of it), and my name (Victor Sasha, this time). She hands me a key with a plastic tab, 117.

  “Good night, Mr. Sasha,” she says in a voice too low and graveled for someone her age. For some reason she reminds me of Violet, of her defiance as a young woman, re-fostering an inclination to call back, to give myself up, a temptation I wash away with another half-dozen tablets as I enter the room. I strip off the flimsy spread and fall onto the bed, my stomach growling, my head grinding as if saws have been let loose inside it. I kick off my shoes, unbutton my shirt, rise, fumble with the air conditioner, return to the bed. The unit motors to life, a buzzing whine that drowns out a neighbor’s pornographic video and the insects outside. The throbbing of my headache changes to match the air conditioner’s rhythm, thoughts sweeping past of what it would be like to die here, alone in the Starlight Motel. So many have died—why not me? Why not now?