by Neal Bowers
He found a street that went through in the right direction and followed it to a bluff at the edge of town, one of his favorite places, a spot left vacant by some quirk of zoning, a little promontory with a view of the traffic on Riverside Drive and the Cumberland River beyond. When he had found it years ago, it seemed secret and pristine. Now, he stepped from the car onto a path of bare dirt, the surrounding brush strewn with beer cans and cigarette butts. Near the edge of the bluff, a large spot had been wallowed in the weeds, as if a huge animal had slept there. Likely high school kids with a blanket.
Below him, the traffic strung out, following the river, making a noise like wind in tall cedars. He had brought his mother here once, in the first year after his father died, thinking she would find it calming. Instead, she looked out over the cars and the tops of the franchise stores and said, “What a mess.” Nothing whimsical or sentimental—what she would call “sappy”—could penetrate her practical, direct approach to life. No jewelry, no makeup, no interest in the household pets. When Tippy grew so old he couldn’t walk without dragging his rear quarters, Davis’s mother was the one who put the poor dog out of his misery, loading him into the trunk of the car for a last trip to the vet’s, saying to Davis, “Come on, boy, quit bawling. It’s just a dog.”
“Yeah, what a mess,” he reflected now, looking out over the river into a brown line of trees that would soon be in full bud. Always skeptical of his mother’s blunt simplicity, he was nevertheless a little envious of it. What would she say right now to put everything into plain perspective?
“Look, kid, you’ve gotta deal with reality. People die. I’m dead and there’s no changing that, so pick up and go on. You’ll die, too. Everybody dies.”
But death has shock waves. What about those? What about the ground shaking underneath your feet while you try to go on? What about the little piece of who you are that dies with another person and can’t ever be retrieved?
“You know, Davis, when people talk about death they get all squidgy. They start saying things you never hear them say any other time—goofy, mushy stuff. It’s better to put your trust in the Lord and then not worry. What’s the point anyway?”
Put your trust in the Lord. That, too, was ironic. Raised a Southern Baptist, she had attended church regularly when Davis was a child but had stopped going once he reached his mid-teens, convinced she’d done her duty. Belief, for her, wasn’t a matter of faith but of common sense. “I don’t know enough not to believe,” she once said. “Anyhow, what can it hurt? Might even pay off in the long run.”
The sun was warm on Davis’s face as he lay back on the brittle weeds and closed his eyes. “Must be close to eleven,” he guessed, resisting the urge to look at his watch. The light through his eyelids was an orange dome, “the color of the sky on another planet,” he thought, watching a deeper red seep through and then become a numbing, crimson blackness.
In the blood-dark of his slumber, a question resonated: “What is nothing? Come on, think hard, Davis. What is nothing?”
“Gotta be a trick question,” Davis reasoned, studying the blank page in front of him. He had to write something or he would fail, but writing something would subvert the question, which itself wasn’t written down but was ringing in the air as if he had asked it himself. Looking around, he could see no one else, only empty desks. “Maybe the right answer is to hand in the page with nothing on it. That’s it! With nothing on it!” But then he was writing, “Nothing is no thing, the absence of thingness. Since the mind is a thing, it can’t conceive its own absence. Therefore, nothing doesn’t exist.”
“Shit! A double negative. Gotta be the wrong answer.” And then the words he had written began to look like squiggles, like a child’s mimicry of language, and a hole opened up somewhere in the center of his chest and he fell into himself, into nothing, nothing, no thing.
“Oh, God!” he screamed, sitting straight up, breathless and damp with sweat. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was, his blood rushing like the traffic below. He looked at his watch. Eleven-thirty. He had been asleep for at least half an hour. Stumbling to his feet, he brushed the debris from his pants and ran a hand through his hair to pull out a dried weed stem. He yanked his shirttail free and fanned it, trying to circulate air underneath as he walked back to the car.
Vertigo was the name he gave these episodes, because he had to call them something, even though he never talked about them with anyone. They had plagued him since childhood, when he would start to plummet just before falling asleep and have to sit up and clutch something solid to keep from losing himself. It was as if he might really go over the edge, the final edge. Sometimes he figured that he should give in to the sensation, that yielding to it might be the way to conquer it, but he lacked the courage. He had even armed himself with some reassuring terminology—Dark Night of the Soul—and a maxim that was paradoxical and therefore wonderfully suited to his absurd problem—“The way down is the way up.” But in the face of that yawning chasm, which seemed simultaneously inside and outside him, such philosophical nets were pathetically small.
“The answering abyss,” he thought as he gripped the warm door handle of the car, liking the sound of the words, feeling they explained something, though he couldn’t be sure what.
Checking his face in the mirror, he tried to smooth his hair where it had been flattened during his nap, then shook his head vigorously and made a growling noise to shake off the self-loathing he felt coming on. His throat was lacquered—by the sun, he reasoned, shoving aside the knowledge of thirst as a symptom of very high blood sugar. Thinking of something cold to drink, he turned in the direction of Two Rivers Mall at the bottom of the hill, the mall that had killed downtown Clarksville and was now slowly dying itself as a newer commercial development on the other side of town lured people away.
The parking lot that had been a demolition derby of cars competing for space was now so empty Davis pulled into a slot ten yards from the main door. Once inside, he watched the young woman at the Orange Julius counter crack an egg into a cup, blend it, and then hand the concoction to an old man in a FORGET, HELL! cap with a cartoon Confederate brandishing a sword.
“A large diet cola,” he said when the clerk’s eyes rolled toward him.
He chose a bench in the center of the mall, so he could watch the few customers stroll in and out of stores. Occasionally, small groups of older women squeaked by in walking shoes, arms neatly bent, uppercutting the air. Less than four months ago, he had wandered from window to window here, trying to find a Christmas present for his mother, whose no-frills lifestyle made gifts difficult. More than once, she had returned a bathrobe or a pair of house slippers, saying, “I don’t need anything this nice. Besides, I can have two for what you paid.”
In desperation, he had bought a bathroom set: hand towel, bath towel, washcloth, toilet-seat cover, and bath rug, all green. Pulling on the straw in his soft drink, he tried to remember if those were the ones he had seen in the bathroom that morning.
“Davis?” a voice asked over his shoulder. “Davis Banks?”
Turning around, he saw a middle-aged woman in a tailored tan suit smiling down at him. “It’s Ann Louise, Ann Louise Wilson. You don’t remember me, do you?”
Until he heard the name, Davis didn’t remember, but then Ann Louise’s face from high school became visible behind the older one he hadn’t recognized.
“Ann Louise! Of course I remember you,” he insisted, watching both faces merge.
“Don’t tell me you’ve finally moved back.”
“No. No . . . I’m here on personal business. My mother just died.” Once more, Davis’s honesty took him off guard.
Ann Louise stood for a moment, then sat down on the bench, her shoulder bag between them.
“I lost my parents a few years ago,” she said. “It’s not easy, is it?” Slipping the strap off her shoulder, Ann Louise moved the bag to her other side.
“No.” Davis felt distant.
“I�
��m on my lunch break. Headed for the salad bar at Morrison’s.”
Davis stood and looked at his watch.
“In a hurry?”
“No. Just don’t want to make you late.”
“That your lunch?” she asked, pointing to the soft-drink cup.
“Uh, no. I’m supposed to eat later with my relatives. You know how they pile on the food when someone dies.”
“Then you can talk to me while I eat,” she said, standing quickly and looking directly into Davis’s eyes.
They walked without speaking into the deep-fried smell of Morrison’s Cafeteria, and Ann Louise slid a tray along the silver bars that passed before steaming heaps of food. A simple gesture would produce a bowl of pinto beans or a plate of crumbly chicken, and Davis watched as everyone around him pointed at almost everything, some of them needing two trays to hold the bowls and plates.
“This must be the only place in the mall that isn’t about to go under.”
“People have to eat,” Ann Louise responded, deciding on the garden-fresh salad.
Once they were seated, Davis silently created interlocking wet rings on the tabletop with the bottom of his water glass, until he grew self-conscious and said, “So, where do you work?”
“I’m a . . .” Ann Louise started, then held up her hand, forefinger extended, to mark her place in the conversation while she swallowed. “I’m a detective,” she said, dabbing the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “Clarksville Police Department.”
Davis felt himself slipping into Ben Blau mode. A detective, right. He almost asked to see her badge or gun but said only, “Really?”
“No, I just say that to make people think I’m capable of holding down a tough job and to scare away the creeps. I’m actually a napkin folder at the Stagecoach Inn.”
“Sorry. Did I sound that astonished?”
Ann Louise smiled faintly and said, “It’s all right. I get the wide-eyed treatment a lot. Can’t say I’m used to it, but it doesn’t surprise me anymore.”
“How did you become a detective?”
Drawing in a deep breath, Ann Louise gave what sounded like a stock recitation of facts: “Started out in law school. Didn’t like it. Switched to law enforcement. Spent eight years in a squad car. Got promoted.” After she finished, she made a mock bow from the waist.
Ignoring the sarcasm, Davis followed with another question. “What’s your area of expertise?”
“Homicide.”
“Are there enough murders in Clarksville to keep you busy?”
“I don’t remember you as a smart-ass, but you’re doing a good impression of one right now.”
For the first time, Davis noticed the color of Ann Louise’s eyes, green-gold, and the way her brown hair caught the light in a soft curve on each side of her face. He wanted to start over, to call 911 and ask for her: “Man needs assistance in Two Rivers Mall.”
“Davis. Davis.” Her voice echoed across a void, as if he were dead or dying and she was trying to call him back. He waited for her to ask, “Who did this to you?” But she just kept saying his name.
“Uh, look, I’ve got to go,” he said, stumbling to his feet. His body was almost too heavy to move, or the air itself had become thicker. Signs of dangerously high blood sugar. Why hadn’t he checked when the insatiable thirst came on? Could be off the scale by now. When he reached the car and dropped the keys while getting inside, he realized Ann Louise had followed him.
She picked up the keys and held on to them. “You on something?” she asked, sounding like a cop.
Davis was fumbling with his diabetic kit, trying to get his blood sugar meter and the insulin he knew he would need. Without answering Ann Louise’s question, he pricked a finger and placed a drop of blood on a strip he inserted into the small meter. In less than a minute, the number 573 appeared in the little window. “Holy shit!”
“What’s wrong?” Ann Louise asked, his tension infecting her.
“I’m a damned diabetic, that’s what’s wrong.” Already, he was drawing insulin into a syringe and swabbing a spot on his stomach. “Ten units ought to do it,” he calculated aloud, forgetting about Ann Louise as he jabbed the needle in and thumbed the plunger. When she insisted that he needed a doctor, he laughed and said, “Actually, I need a pancreas.”
“Move over,” she ordered, one foot already edging him away from the driver’s side. “You’re not in any condition to drive.” Or did she say, “Your condition is driving me in”? He couldn’t be sure as he slumped to his right and closed his eyes. Such a sweet peacefulness, green-gold and darkening.
Her question “How long do these spells usually last?” roused Davis from his stupor, though the air still felt like pudding.
“Spells?” he asked, looking about him at a strange neighborhood.
“Come on, better get you inside.” Now she was opening the car door on his side and grasping his left forearm and elbow.
“You gonna cuff me?” He laughed.
The last thing he remembered was the door, a darkened room, a bed. Then he was deep in the chocolate dark, his mind a dropped jigsaw of images.
*
Static chatter. Snippets of griffin-speak. And he snapped awake. “Who’s there?” he challenged, drawing his legs toward him and backing against the headboard of the bed.
Then Ann Louise’s face became visible as she turned on a lamp. The voices kept shrilling from a two-way radio lying on the foot of the bed until she turned it off, saying, “They can get along without me for half an hour.”
Davis felt himself struggling to assemble the pieces—the woman, the room, the voices. Tentatively, he said, “Ann Louise . . .”
“You’re at my place. You’ve been sleeping for over two hours, which makes it nearly three P.M.” She tipped her wrist toward the lamplight to check her watch. “Quarter till, to be exact.”
Davis looked around the room. Except for the bed, a night table and lamp, it was empty. No pictures on the walls, no dresser or bureau. At one end, a closet door stood half open. “This what you cops call a safe house?”
Ann Louise laughed as she sat on the end of the bed. “Safe enough. It’s my house.”
Davis could feel her weight through the coils in the box springs and mattress as she shifted to look more directly at him. “Right. I remember you said that a minute ago,” he said.
“Is this what they call a diabetic reaction?”
The question made Davis feel weary. How to explain diabetes to someone who knows nothing about it? “No, not a reaction. It’s the opposite, in fact.”
When Davis said nothing else, Ann Louise leaned toward him. “I don’t get it.”
“Okay. A reaction involves too much insulin. What happened to me at the mall was the result of too much sugar and not enough insulin.”
“Is it dangerous? I mean, could you die?”
“It would take a few days with high blood sugar. Much faster with insulin shock.”
“Then why didn’t you let me call a doctor?”
“All I needed was a shot of insulin, and I got that. Now I’m fine, as you can see.”
“You don’t look so great to me.”
“Well, you look terrific from where I’m sitting.”
They fell silent. Ann Louise rose quickly and was nearly out of the room when she remembered her radio and turned back. “Look, stay as long as you like. Your car’s parked out front.” Then she was gone.
In the bathroom, Davis splashed water on his face and reached for a towel. It was damp. He buried his face in it, slowly inhaling the scent of Ann Louise’s soap. Then he looked up at himself in the mirror and said, “Pervert.”
He walked through the small house, each room empty or stacked with unpacked boxes. In the living room, a single recliner faced a small television. It was not so much a room for living as for waiting, somehow personal despite its sparse decor. No plants, no knickknacks. Nothing on the walls. As he backed out and pulled the door toward him, her soap-scent swarmed his
head.
CHAPTER 5
__________
DAVIS GOT TO Uncle Oscar and Aunt Goldie’s around five-thirty. As he pulled into their driveway, the commotion began—half a dozen cousins spilling onto the front porch and lawn. Leading them, wringing her hands in her flowered apron, was Goldie. All hips and thighs, she seemed to be spreading slowly back into the earth, her narrow shoulders topped by a little head that bobbled from side to side as if it needed tightening at the neck.
“Where in the world you been? I got so frantic I sent Gaylon to your mama’s house to see if you was all right.”
Looking slightly amused by the whole scene and grateful to be only on the fringes of it, Gaylon, the lanky teenage son of a cousin, said, “The house was all shut up, so I thumped on the windows and blew my horn real loud. Then I seen the car was gone.”
“See,” Goldie said emphatically. “We was all worried.”
Davis heard himself say he had driven out into the country and gotten lost. “Ended up having lunch with an old couple named Scofield or Sheffield. Never could quite make out the name. Real nice folks.”
“Ain’t nobody with neither of them names around here, boy. You must’ve got yourself real lost,” Uncle Oscar said with a sidelong regard.
“Well, come on in, come on in. There’s still food on the table,” said Aunt Goldie as she scurried everyone toward the house, her square-heeled shoes pecking the sidewalk. “Whatever you had at that other place can’t compare with family cooking.”
Davis was about to say the Scofield/Sheffields were somebody’s family, when he realized Aunt Goldie was standing beside a chair at the table with her spoon dipped into a bowl brimming with crowder peas. “Well, do you or don’t you?” she asked.
“Uh, yes, I do,” said Davis, abruptly brought back. He unfolded a turquoise paper napkin as he sat down.