by Neal Bowers
“Now, wait. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say the interpretation bends that way?”
“I’m a cop. Following leads and going where they take me is my job.”
“Suppose I could prove to you, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Ralph Banks and Charles Winningham never heard of each other. How would that fit with your trail of leads?”
“But you can’t prove it.”
“Just suppose I could.”
“Why not suppose you could prove your father was Babe Ruth?”
Davis started the engine, muttering “Shit” as he dodged back into traffic. “You could at least admit you’re not sure.”
“Neither are you, or you wouldn’t be playing this game.”
“Then you admit you’re not sure.”
Ann Louise took in a deep breath as if to make a long statement, then exhaled slowly. They were wedged in traffic, pulled along at the speed of the highway current. “Somewhere, under everything else, something happened. We can’t always know for one-hundred-percent certain what it was, but we can get close. It’s what I do.”
Davis felt at home as he listened to Ann Louise. Safe ground for someone accustomed to playing with the interpretation of texts. “Suppose two cars wreck at a busy intersection. Twenty people witness it. When the cops take statements, how many versions of the accident will they get?”
“Oh, a story problem! Haven’t heard one of those since ninth grade. Don’t you really want to know how far apart the cars will be when they’re towed away in opposite directions?”
“Just answer the question. Will all twenty people tell the same story?”
“No.”
“Is it possible that some of the witnesses will blame one driver and some the other?”
“This is tiresome, Davis. You already know what the answers are.”
“Okay, then just substitute Winningham and my father for the two drivers. They somehow collided at Greenwood Cemetery. No eyewitnesses. Everybody comes along later to view the scene. How do we know which of the stories they tell is the right one?”
“Something happened. Winningham was under your father’s coffin. That’s a fact.”
“But how and why did he get there? That’s where all the interpretation begins.”
Warming to the game, Ann Louise returned to Davis’s hypothetical wreck. “We wouldn’t just rely on witness statements, you know. We’d measure skid marks. Look for point of impact. Inspect damage to both cars. The evidence would lead us to a particular conclusion.”
“In other words, you’d figure out a logical way to tell the story of the wreck.”
“Figuring it out isn’t the same thing as making it up.”
“Do the skid marks and bent fenders always tell an obvious story?”
“Combined with all those conflicting witness statements and common sense, they generally do.”
“What if one of the drivers is a little old lady? Any chance her age might cause an officer to jump to conclusions about her driving ability?”
“There’s no end to this game, is there?”
“You’re giving up, then?”
“I’m getting tired. Cover them with as much dirt or as many versions as you like, but facts are facts.”
“What I’m after is the way we come to know the facts. Lots of room there for versions, don’t you think?”
Ann Louise looked out her side window and said nothing. The traffic thinned out at Riverside Drive when Davis kept going uphill into the heart of Clarksville. “Bet you were born over there in the old hospital.” Davis’s right hand fluttered off the wheel and back, giving the smallest sign of direction, getting no response.
Ann Louise might have thought Davis was headed for the police station and his own car, but when he passed the turnoff, she said nothing until he zagged through an older section of town and pulled to the curb. Rambling two-story frame houses lined both sides of the street. The kind of neighborhood that might eventually be gentrified or yuppified. “What’re we doing here?”
“Thought you might like to see where I was born.” Davis pointed to a weathered white house with a wraparound porch. “Right there.”
“Your mother didn’t make it to the hospital in time?”
“She planned to have me at home. Wasn’t a believer in doctors. A neighbor stood in as midwife and took care of everything. My father took the afterbirth and buried it in the side yard. It was June, hot as blazes, and he dug a little grave and shoveled it under.” In the streetlight, Davis could see the solemn expression on Ann Louise’s face as she visualized the process.
“Something I never told a soul,” he continued, eyes fixed on the house, “is I’ve always thought they buried my twin there.”
Ann Louise studied the house in silence.
“If I ever have enough money, I’m going to buy the old place and have the yard dug up.”
“Why do you think you were a twin?”
“I’ve always felt part of me is missing. Feeling’s been even stronger since I became diabetic. The big clue is that I was never given a middle name. Or maybe Davis is a middle name and I don’t have a first one. I think my parents picked out a girl’s name and a boy’s. When two boys came, they split the boy’s names between my twin and me. Maybe he was William.”
“Pretty flimsy evidence.”
“My grandmother had a twin. Olivia and Viola. My mother said you couldn’t tell them apart. They’d sometimes trade places to see how long it would take someone to notice. Sometimes I dream of my stillborn brother. Other times, he’s alive when my father shovels the dirt over his face. My folks never had much money. Must have been a jolt to have two babies.”
Shaken by the story and its grisly possibilities, Ann Louise said, “Twins don’t always both survive.”
“But why me and not him? Or what if I am him? What if it was me who died that day?” Watching Ann Louise’s face grow more serious, more concerned, Davis continued, “What if none of this is true?”
Rising from her webby reverie, Ann Louise demanded, “What’s not true?”
Davis just looked at her, his face impassive.
“You mean none of what you just told me is true? Is that what you mean?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what the hell did you say?”
“I said what if none of this is true.”
“In other words, you’re still playing the game, the goddamned stupid game! Well, to hell with you, Davis Banks.”
“Hold on. Hold on. What’d I do?”
“You made up the whole story, didn’t you? Every bit of it was a lie.”
“I never said that.”
“It is a lie, isn’t it?”
“I just offered up a big chunk of my soul to you and you think I was lying? So much for your detective’s intuition.”
“Were you lying, Davis? Tell me honestly. Were you?”
“Why not just follow the leads and figure it out for yourself?”
For a moment, Davis thought Ann Louise would strike him. Then she fumbled her seat belt off and opened the door. When she crossed the street and stood looking at the house, where no lights showed from inside, Davis wondered if she might start digging in the yard. Pacing the sidewalk, she seemed agitated enough to scoop the earth with her bare hands. When she returned to the car, she stood rigidly at the driver’s door and said, “Get out.”
Davis did as he was told, stumbling into the middle of the street as Ann Louise drove away, her brake lights winking once at the top of the hill, nothing left but the slight chill of the air. He could walk the half mile to the parking lot to get his car. Ann Louise must have calculated the nearness before she left him. Wouldn’t have dumped him if they had been miles into nowhere. Or would she? How was she already shaping the story that would explain herself to herself—the one that would explain him?
Walking along Second Street, Davis felt invisible, not airy but dense, a black hole, a shadow like a blink. He was present only in the moment when the
lids went down. Gone when they went up again. By the time he got to the car, he was a blotch on the window, a thick smudge on glass. Someone driving by was playing loud music, bass notes rumbling in Davis’s stomach, a steady throbbing, like a second pulse. Heartbeat of the person he never was, the twin he might have been. Spun in a gauzy fatigue, he lay across the front seat, face pressed into the ribbed cushion, hands twitching an abstract sleep-language.
*
The silence woke him, and at first he thought he was dreaming. The parking lot lights hovered orange-white around him, the only noise his own throat trying to swallow. “Time.” The thought was a movement in his left arm, bringing his wrist near his face. Broken time. No time. Alarm for high blood sugar far away in his head, like the muffled thud of underground pounding.
He started the engine and pulled into the abandoned street, the rumble of the exhaust loud against the buildings. Stoplights flashed their between-time yellow. Even the drunks had long ago staggered to their hidden corners. Rolling down his window, letting the cool air pour in, Davis felt part of something big and calm and secure. Emptiness. Obscurity. The heaviness in his bones was the packed-down heaviness of earth. A burial and a resurrection.
Nearing his mother’s house, he shut off the engine and coasted the last half block, making a sharp turn into the driveway. Silence of the dead and the come-again. Home. He silently rounded the word, letting it fill his mouth, feeling it end in a little kiss. A peck on the cheek of the vanishing moment. This time it seemed right not to find his mother there, his mind already making the erasures.
In his old bedroom he pulled his father’s suits from the closet and tugged armloads of his mother’s dresses from the drooping line, piling them near the front door. Next came record albums, boxes of photographs, and the croquet mallet with black rings, the one his father always chose. From his mother’s bedroom, he took only the companion pillow.
Davis thought of tomb rummagers hauling out everything sacred to some pharoah. But this was more like a garage-sale pile, a dump for Goodwill. No one else would want these things. But he needed something to show for the years, parts of the past to hold his version of the past in place. Stuffing the trunk and then the backseat, cramming hard and shouldering for greater compaction, he filled the car. When he thought he couldn’t get anything else in, he went back for more and pushed harder. No matter if everything was jumbled and crumpled, it could be sorted later, smoothed out like the telling of a story, or not smoothed but still a story in itself. Ralph and Ellen and Davis. As simple as that.
When nothing else would fit except the pictures hanging on the living room wall, Davis phoned Ann Louise.
After nine rings, Ann Louise’s voice answered with a hoarse “This better be good.”
“Should I sell the house or burn it?”
“This some kind of sick joke?”
“I’m trying to decide how to manage my mother’s estate, and my options are to sell her house or burn it. Which do you think I should do?”
“Davis? I think you need to sober up.”
“Haven’t had a drop. You gonna give me your opinion or not?”
“Couldn’t this have waited until morning?”
Davis responded by hanging up the phone. On his way out the door, he thought of the videocassette that had been recording when he arrived from the airport and stopped to eject it from the machine. He remembered the Brenda Lee album tipped against the wall at the end of the sofa and took it too. Then he stepped onto the front porch, looked back inside one last time, and left the door standing open. “To let the night in,” he thought.
When he stopped for gas at an all-night station, the man in the little booth said, “Now that’s the way to pack a car.”
Something about his drawl, the slow way he said the word “car,” made Davis laugh, and then he couldn’t stop. What a great joke everything was. How infinitely funny.
“Take an IOU?” he asked through his laughter.
The drawling man grinned uncertainly, not understanding the humor.
“Oh, hell. Just put it on my tab. William Banks. Charge it to William Davis Banks,” Davis said, getting behind the wheel as the attendant rushed out of the booth yelling for him to stop. Knowing the man would call the police, Davis doubled back toward Clarksville and took the first rural road that led in the direction of the interstate. The car’s rumble leveled out as he drove faster, and soon he was seeing the signs for I-24.
“East or west?” he thought. “East or west.” Then, simply because the east ramp came first, he turned onto it and headed in the direction of Nashville. “Gonna be a country music star. Yahoo!” he yelled, reaching for the radio dial. But as he neared the last Clarksville exit, he slowed and took it, stopping at the end of the ramp. How could he have forgotten his mother, his unburied mother in her blue dress? What if no one but Goldie and Oscar and Pastor Watkins came for the service, the three of them scraping the soft earth from their shoes and talking of the bosom of the Good Lord?
As he sat beneath the wheeling sky, musty scent of old clothing blooming in the car, sachet of dead petals, the blue light of a patrol cruiser strobed behind him. He shifted upright and sat motionless as the officer adjusted his spotlight so that it illuminated the car. Davis watched in the mirror as the figure approached, hand on his gun.
When the cop got near enough to bend down and look in the window, he said, “Davis? Davis Banks?” It was Earl Hearndon, a high school classmate. “What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”
“I was just trying to get home.”
“You got gas without paying back there at the all-night station.”
“Did I?”
Earl stood up and reflected for a moment, then bent down close to the window. “Sorry to hear about your mama. Haven’t been drinking, have you, Davis?”
Davis huffed a deep breath in Earl’s direction.
“What the hell is all this stuff?” Earl was shining his flashlight inside, illuminating blouses and pants and socks.
“Laundry.”
“Look, I’ll take care of that gas bill, but you’ve got to follow me. I’ll get you home. Okay?”
Davis nodded and waited for Earl to get back into his squad car and pull around him. His blue lights drew Davis back from the outskirts of town and into the neighborhood where his mother had lived. When they reached her house, Earl pulled over and let Davis arc around him into the driveway.
All the lights were on, and Ann Louise was standing in the doorway. When she stepped onto the porch, the beam from behind was an incline she descended. Davis felt the old bone-weariness, sweet fatigue of coming home, sugar tide risen in the blood. When he leaned back and closed his eyes, he was deep in the crystalized thicket, but someone was coming nearer; someone was calling his name.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NEAL BOWERS was born and raised in Clarksville, Tennessee, but has lived the past quarter century in Ames, Iowa. Among his six previous books, the most recent are Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist (nonfiction) and Night Vision (poetry). He and his wife, Nancy, also a writer, are supervised by six very helpful cats.
ALSO BY NEAL BOWERS
POETRY
Night Vision
Lost in the Heartland
The Golf Ball Diver
NONFICTION
Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist
James Dickey: The Poet as Pitchman
Theodore Roethke: The Journey from I to Otherwise
Copyright © 2001 by Neal Bowers
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bowers, Neal.
Loose ends: a novel / Neal Bowers.
p. cm.
1. Mothers—Death—Fiction. 2. College teachers—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3552.O8732 L6 2001
813’.54—dc21 00-034166
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-0-375-50691-8
v3.0