Maybe I could get a bag full of greasy leftovers to go, and feed the grateful gulls outside.
With a deep sigh and a sense of impending failure I picked up my knife and fork and got stuck in.
It was surprising to me how little she had spoken about him.
“My parents got me from an orphanage near Durham. It was a place for little girls. The town’s not far from where they lived. It was pretty. Do you know it?” I assumed she meant Durham rather than the actual orphanage. I nodded.
“It’s in the North, with a cathedral and a university.” She hesitated.
“I’ve been there, or very close to there. Isn’t Holy Island nearby?”
“Were you there?”
I nodded some more. “A long time ago. I was married. We drove across at low water and visited the ruins and stopped at a small hotel with a bar that was open on a Sunday. It was a windy spot. We had to rush back to beat the tide.”
“People get stranded,” she remarked.
“We cut it close.”
“I tell people that I don’t remember it. I do. There was an old greenhouse in the gardens. It wasn’t used any more and most of the glass panes were broken. We couldn’t play there. It wasn’t safe. There was a sunroom with wicker chairs and glass tables with old dolls on them. These are images. I can’t tell if they are real or if I made them up. Perhaps there was a huge hall with high windows and no curtains and wooden cots painted white in rows. I remember a shiny floor and ladies with mops and buckets of strong disinfectant. I must have crawled on the floor at some point. I was only three when I left. It’s all gone now. The building is still there. The university uses it for student residences. They put their first-year girls in there.”
* * *
I told her I was sorry that her parents were dead.
She thanked me. “They died together.”
She had told me this already. I said nothing.
“It was a car crash. Up north. They were in Scotland. Motoring in the Highlands. They loved it there. They had a little caravan that we always used for our holidays. They were traveling through the rain and mist and went off the road. My dad was driving. He always drove the caravan faster than Mum did. They were on a narrow road. There was one lane. The traffic behind them was impatient. They were honking their horns. If Mum had been driving she would have laughed at them. She would have gone slower. Dad would let them bully him into speeding up. He’d get all embarrassed and try to get to a lay-by and pull over to let them all pass. Mum used to get so mad at him for doing that. She always said the road was just as much theirs. When they went off the side and through a broken fence and down a hill there were thirty cars in a line behind them, the police report said, but only one man stopped and tried to help them. He phoned for the police and climbed down the hill in the rain and even tried to lift the caravan up. But it was too heavy and it had flattened their stupid little car.”
There wasn’t a lot I could say to that.
Then she hesitated. “You came here to tell me about my real father.”
“You don’t seem that interested.”
There was another pause. “No,” she said at last.
I said nothing. I wanted to correct her. As far as I was concerned, her real father had died with her real mother under a wet caravan at the bottom of a Scottish hill, two victims of lethally bad manners.
But I didn’t.
“Is there anything you can tell me that will make me feel any different about him?”
“How do you feel about him?” I asked.
“I’ve listened to his songs.”
“And?”
“They’re nice.”
“I think so too.”
“You obviously like them more than I do,” she said. I didn’t reply.
She looked out the window. “Are you leaving?” she asked.
“Soon. I think. I want to drive some of the way tonight.”
“So tell me something before you go.”
And with that supremely indifferent request I would proceed to tell her almost everything I had learned in the past two weeks about her father.
* * *
Later on we said our goodbyes. I got up to leave. The rain had begun to pour in earnest. I did notice that.
And I also observed that the old Datsun truck had returned and the window cleaner was lurking outside the shop looking decidedly sheepish. Wet sheepish, I should probably amend that to. Had he forgotten one of his ladders perhaps? But I thought not. No man waves that much to a woman. Not unless he has a cramp in his arm.
We brushed against each other as he entered and I exited. The urge to whisper “Good luck” was strong, but I was somehow able to resist. Had he changed his sweater? I turned around. It was certainly possible. Maybe he was wearing his lucky sweater.
I unapologetically turned and stared at them.
He stood at her table and they both smiled. He pulled off his soaked wool hat like a true gent and his hair, a wild fright of dripping curls, bounced into action. I had thought he seemed young but now, newly chapeau-less and freshly re-jerseyed, he looked older, closer to Catriona’s age.
I wanted to stare more, but the dictates of decorum prevailed.
As I waited to cross the street I wondered if she would talk to him about the bracelet, and about the song, and about her father. She certainly did like to talk.
And while I really hoped that she would tell him, it was doubtful.
Catriona was mostly lonely.
Catriona mostly liked to talk about herself.
Catriona had lost her parents recently.
And nothing I had told her or given her had changed any of these things.
But I’m getting far ahead of myself.
Because all this would take place several days and several thousand miles northwest of New Orleans. Before I would get to New Orleans there would be a road trip due south, with a pit stop at the halfway mark, where I would briefly experience the refined gentility of life in Oxford, Mississippi.
And that road trip south would begin in the southern suburbs of Chicago.
Which is where the story really begins.
Three
This was the beginning.
The lure of free Wi-Fi and a warm place to sit had led a young man in a cheery argyle sweater vest and pastel polo shirt upper-body ensemble and threadbare Madras cargo shorts, to an empty table in a crowded coffee shop twenty miles due south of Chicago. His outfit was certainly bold and eye-catching. His shorts were grimy. His laptop was an older model that stood open and running on the table. The black plastic was heavily stickered, scratched deeply in places, the screen patinaed with a thick filter of grease and dust. Old-school earmuff headphones were plugged into one side of the machine, while a generic red plastic flash drive was attached and blinking reassuringly as the images played out on the screen.
By chance I had occupied the next table, and was thus able to spy shamelessly.
He was watching something I was quite certain I hadn’t seen before, period science fiction, from the indistinct past. My best guess was somewhere in the seventies. A pointy-chested woman with purple hair fashioned in a sharp, near eye-level fringe was poured into a slick plastic miniskirt.
The young man gazed fixedly at the screen as the woman placed a metallic helmet over her head and pushed an improbably huge button on a wall made entirely of glass. As she did, it slid noiselessly open to reveal a brightly lit hallway, complete with a moving floor of space-age deep-pile shag that whisked her away.
I watched as he picked up his coffee. He frowned and put it back down. His beverage had come in a cup with an orange and pink corporate logo on the side, whereas the rest of us were in lockstep with the host brand.
Yet he continued to sit there, utterly bold and shameless.
The cafe was busy in the middle of t
he morning. The Internet-accessible tables were lined along one wall facing the counter, and were clearly each intended for two people, two paying people. Yet there he was; a very singular and noticeable party of one who had purchased nothing here, with a soiled backpack squatting on another chair lined up directly in front of him.
I had already observed that several customers had glared his way ineffectually, even going so far as to stand over him, clutching their freshly purchased products like so many talismans of entitlement, but he stood—or rather sat—his ground. So they had eventually retreated, all fuming and foamy under a good head of self-righteousness.
I glanced at my phone. Good God. I had spent the past twenty minutes doing close to nothing but sipping my coffee and observing this young man on a chilly May morning.
When I had first arrived the lady behind the counter had asked, “What can I get you this morning, sweetie?”
That was certainly pleasant, if unexpected. I didn’t get called sweetie too often. A decidedly more senior server than the usual sullen adolescent, she was close to my own age. I smiled, resolving to hit the tip jar hard, one kind word being all it apparently took to render me an emotional dishrag, ripe for a good wringing out.
I asked for a medium coffee.
“Which blend?”
I shrugged my response, then elected to try a little harder. I was a sweetie after all.
“It doesn’t matter. Whatever’s freshest,” I replied with another smile. I can’t, in all honesty, tell much of a difference between Midnight Dark French Roast and Shade Grown Organic Guatemalan, although I like to imagine I can at least distinguish brews of a more recent vintage from the stewed sludge distilled in the early morning in crappier establishments.
But I may well be kidding myself.
Her nametag said Gabby and she was relentlessly friendly as she attended to me and the rest of the walk-in trade.
Meanwhile, three pale youngsters in matching shirts, attitudes, and headsets jumped to the faceless bark of the drive-up intercom and took turns rolling their eyes at Gabby as they bustled past her. When I elected to scan my phone to pay, one of the youths suddenly lasered in on our transaction. Was he expecting the dithering old biddy to hopelessly bungle the operation? Dude, check out the hapless codger.
But, bless her heart, Gabby didn’t. Scanned and done. Score one for the old farts. I was absurdly pleased for her, and would have favored the snotty adolescent with a knowing smirk, but he had turned away.
I smiled instead at Gabby and hastily revised my tip amount upward. We crusties have to stick together.
That was half an hour ago.
The young man got to his feet and walked slowly towards the two adjacent bathrooms located in the back of the store. He took his backpack with him but left the empty coffee cup and the computer on the table. The show was still running, and the woman with the asymmetrical purple hair was revealed as the pilot of what resembled a flying trimaran without a sail. Her co-pilot, I couldn’t fail to notice, also wore a shiny helmet, which didn’t quite cover his two enormous pointy sideburns.
The muted colors and the hairdos helped to more accurately carbon-date the production as definitely somewhere in the early part of the seventies. My best guess was television rather than film. An older actor now stood commandingly, in what I assumed was a bedroom on a larger space ship. His suit was too tight, the lapels would help him take off in a strong wind, and his face was more lined than you would probably expect today, with the ready and pervasive availability of cosmetic surgical work and the forgiving salve of soft-focus camera lenses. His teeth were also slightly crooked.
My phone buzzed and I looked down at the table. An incoming text awaited from Nye, the supercilious and the decidedly more active partner in our chosen commercial endeavors—the largely unrelated worlds of online art supplies and artisan brewing.
He posed three questions. They were as follows:
Where was I? Where did I keep the sugar? Had we passed?
I quickly composed the answers to questions one and three in my head. They would read as follows.
I was on my way home and indeed we had.
I hesitated over the second. His demand for sugar was trickier. I don’t use sugar. Neither does Nye. What to make of this request? He was in my house. Was he perhaps entertaining? Did his guest possess a sweet tooth? Could Nye perhaps be baking? That last seemed singularly unlikely, but I was truthfully stumped.
I suddenly remembered some dried-out brown sugar from a bygone era in a white ceramic pot on a high shelf in the kitchen. Thus able to reply to his text in full, I dutifully did. Asked and answered. Take that Mr. Prior.
Nye was attending Hop Haven, a beer festival in Fort Collins, Colorado. I was visiting our art supply distribution center in the Chicago suburbs. Nye lives in Chicago and I live in Boulder. The explanation for the geographical mismatch is trivial and complicated and, quite frankly, not really worth getting into. Suffice it to say that the anomaly would soon be redressed. I was about to get on the road and drive back cross-country, an activity which I loudly profess to despise, but secretly rather enjoy. Nye was meanwhile hanging with other brewers and beer snobs, doubtless drinking too well and too copiously, and staying at my place for a few short days before returning to Chicago to resume his role as captain of industry—a role he performs well enough to allow me the longtime luxury of mostly malingering and sporadically meddling.
I had been with our crackerjack art supply team in the early morning for an inspection of the facilities by a local government agency. We had passed with flying colors and I was heading home after a session of sundry shoulder patting.
The highway was a handful of intersections away, and would take most of the thousand miles west through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and the irritating three hours of faux Nebraska that is Northeastern Colorado. Iowa is green and rolling and mostly pretty, Nebraska is flat and brown and empty and endless, and the wait for the Rocky Mountains to finally make an appearance takes an agonizing forever, as the Colorado plains very gradually elevate, and only transform into the traditional images of majestic mountains close to Denver.
I had made the drive once in one very long day to prove to myself that I could, but it had been a wretched experience. Today I would go only as far as Lincoln, Nebraska, by the evening, find a hotel room and swim, eat a pizza with chicken and pesto and olives and feta and dried tomatoes in a hipster bar on O Street, and cover the rest of the trip the following day.
This was the extent of my plan.
I was made aware that I had been daydreaming for several minutes by the sound of loud knocking.
One of the younger coffee shop employees was pounding with some urgency on the door of the men’s bathroom. There was clearly no answer. Another employee joined her and they looked at each other in some confusion. There followed a conversation loud enough for the whole store to eavesdrop. A customer was locked in the bathroom. He was not responding to their attempts at intervention. The store manager had the key and she had left to run some errands. She had been texted but had not yet responded.
I somehow knew without looking that the table beside me was going to still be vacant. The computer was still running the television show, as a singular and wholly unrealistic piece of space Styrofoam was blown into tiny fragments time and time again, each explosion accompanied by the close-up of an alternating space pilot’s face, frozen in a stock reaction of either fear or triumph.
Both servers began to beat hard on the toilet door. One was shouting, her voice dreadful and shrill and no longer fully controlled. My Gabby stood firm behind the counter, all alone, attending to customers, with the brilliance of her smile still holding fast. A fourth employee pulled his headset from his ears and was using his cell phone to make an urgent call, standing at the front door, ignoring the drive-thru trade as it began to bristle and honk outside.
A situation
was rapidly evolving and the public reaction varied. A number of the less curious or the morbidly uneasy had got up and left, those who stayed pulled out their cell phones and made ready to summon electronic help.
One of the two employees outside the restroom door was pawing at it thoughtfully, clearly considering a full-on assault on the locked wood. Would the door hold? Would her shoulder give out? And just how comprehensive was the company medical coverage going to be anyway?
What I chose to do next surprised me. I can offer no explanation.
Without thinking I leaned across the table and pulled the flash drive from the abandoned computer and stuck it quickly inside my trouser pocket. Next I got to my feet and walked quickly towards the front door, throwing my almost empty cup into the garbage and pushing past the employee now all but yelling into his phone.
I didn’t look back.
Outside I could see that the drive-thru line was now a static eleven cars, rendering it no longer possible to drive either in or out of the café parking lot. At that precise moment a car horn broadcast that very fact.
I got as far as holding the front door open.
The car horn stopped. There was a moment of loud silence. And then came two sounds and a hesitation between: a splintering crash as lock and wood gave way, and an earsplitting and prolonged scream, a woman’s scream, both sounds coming from deep inside the cafe.
I walked quickly across the parking lot to the street and got to my car. The urge to start the car and pull away fast was strong, but instead I sat for a minute with the doors locked and looked across the street. Set back from the road was a narrow steel footbridge that spanned two parallel sets of train tracks. On one the Amtrak train ran twice a day between Chicago and New Orleans, and during the long hours in between, a series of protracted freight trains commandeered the rail. On the track, the commuter electric line connected the big city to a succession of Chicago metro south suburban towns. The electric trains ran at least once every hour, slightly more often during the peak commuting times in the early morning and evening. A stucco brown station building served double duty for the commuters going to and from work on the electric and those taking Amtrak for the longer haul going south to colleges downstate, all the way to Memphis, or to Jackson, Mississippi, or still further south, down into Louisiana, for whatever romantic or desperate reason.
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