South, America

by Rod Davis

  I let my head lean against the seat back and closed my eyes. She reached over with her free hand to lightly caress my chest. My woman, taking care of me. Life was good. The rhythm of the road was soothing. In that spirit, I thought it wise to reexamine things, a kind of pain-and-pills autobiographical précis. It flashed out into a nice little daydream manuscript, all right there on my mental Powerbook, the Apple of my third eye.

  “Jack . . . Jack . . .” I gradually heard a voice and felt hands pushing against my arm. “Jack, are you okay?”

  The dream in my head stopped. I opened my eyes and shook my head.

  “You were shaking and mumbling something. My name, I think.”

  I tried to get my mouth to work. If I had been mumbling, it must have been pretty unintelligible. I reached down to the floor for a water bottle and took a drink.

  “I’m okay. Sorry. I didn’t mean to drift away.”

  “I just thought you were having a nightmare.”

  I looked at a road sign, which said we were coming into Onward, a wide spot in the road consisting mostly of a convenience store and gas station.

  “I’m going to stop,” Elle said.

  “Good. I need to get out.”

  We filled up, took care of business. I wasn’t pissing blood, a small favor for which I was immensely grateful.

  I walked back to the Explorer to wait for Elle. The air was almost sweet, heavy with the river. My gaze wandered to a big wooden sign at the edge of the parking lot. I walked over. It was tourist information, like at Witch Dance. But not about witches. It said that near this spot, Teddy Roosevelt had refused to kill a captured bear while on a hunting trip, and that’s how a “Teddy Bear” got its name.

  Elle came up. I was so zoned out it startled me. We drove away, me wondering what would the bear would have done if it had the gun.

  At Vicksburg I was hungry again so we stopped for lunch. Elle was quiet, looking off in a private distance as we ate. I thanked her for driving since I was still cruising in and out of real time. She said she had it covered, to just rest because the city still lay ahead and I would need my strength. Good woman, I kept thinking. This is a good woman.

  It occurred to me I hadn’t checked my answering machine at home in days. I did so from my cell as we walked back to the Explorer. I had a dozen messages, four from editors, four from Ray Oubre, two from a couple of occasional drinking pals from the Times-Pic, one a hang-up, and one from Art Becker. He said he was calling because someone had been around looking at the property and had knocked on the door asking for me. He said the man was a white guy, late thirties, well-dressed, said he was a friend but didn’t leave a name.

  It wasn’t that hard to track me down in New Orleans. Being reachable was a big part of my business. Still. I told Elle about Art’s visitor as we drove away.

  “Trey, right?”

  I said that was the way I figured it.

  She’d checked her voicemail, too, and said no one had called except for someone at the university asking if there was anything she needed and when she thought she might be back.

  I briefly nodded off as we drove on, cutting over to Natchez to cross the big river on its western bank. It wouldn’t be the fastest way down to New Orleans, but even though we had little at this point to fear from being followed, taking a minor state highway rather than the main drags was a good way to spot a tail. Elle agreed, lost in her own thoughts. We chose a route that would take us down through Baton Rouge and into New Orleans on Highway 61, which I always used when I was at LSU.

  About ten miles from Natchez she wheeled to the side of the road, came to a crunching stop in the apron gravel. Without a word, she flung open her door, got out, and ran around the front to the shoulder on the passenger side. I was opening my door to see what was wrong when she doubled up and her body began to heave in spasms.

  A procession of 18-wheelers, SUVs and panel trucks shot by like phantoms. When I touched her back to see I could help, she shrugged me off, angrily. I went back to the car for a napkin from our last stop. I hurried back and gave it to her to wipe her mouth, then went back to find a bottle of water.

  She leaned against the front fender, then sat on the bumper, spat out the foam in her mouth, and drained the bottle. She threw it far into the weeds, litter be damned, and walked back around the front of the Explorer, climbed back inside. I barely had time to get in and buckle up before she peeled up the shoulder and rammed into the traffic, hitting eighty-five before she decided to slow down.

  Still, she didn’t talk. Instead, turned up the radio. We were now in junk broadcast land and it took some intervention on my part to find something at least tolerable.

  We were through Natchez, across the high bridge over the river, and into Louisiana before she said anything. I had seen this before and should have seen it this time, too. And maybe would have without the fog of pain-killers. She’d been too in control, too calm. Too bottled up.

  Who knew if that was the best or worst way to deal? Especially with what she was facing. But she was my girl and that was her way.

  She talked now, talked for long miles, uncorking the bottle. We slid down the edge of Louisiana on a bumpy state highway spotted with towns whose chief industries seemed to be gas stations, washaterias and drive-through daiquiri stands. I mostly listened, event though it was hard to take in all at once.

  It came out too fast, too fragmented, to consider as some kind of rational discourse. Something only approachable in the abstract, in the aftermath, like piecing together the chronology of a bad car wreck right in front of you that happens in real time but has to be recollected in the more limited terms of human apprehension.

  She put personal history together, tore it apart—the most awful thing a person can do to herself. It’s the kind of horror that shrinks get paid to unravel. Which Elle was. So maybe she had a special talent for it. But she had no shrink for herself. Just me, to hear the things that no person should have to say.

  The story of a life built on a lie.

  It had blindsided her. It had taken her entire family. And now it wanted her.

  As fast as it had started, the confessional stopped. Not like it was over. More like it had hit a wall. Another wall. Presently her breathing calmed, her grip on the steering wheel eased and the blood returned to her cheeks and fingers. There was nothing I could say, and I didn’t. Then for a moment she seemed to drift into something else, almost like what I had seen in Lenora. Words came from her mouth, but I wondered if I had really heard them: “Now I know who you are, and me never seeing it. Me, your sister with the second sight.”

  A nasty rainstorm put her full attention back on the road—the weather dogging us again. Big drops hit the roof so hard it sounded like hail. I offered to drive but she waved me off. I theorized that as a shrink, she had to have known she couldn’t function through what was sure to come without emotional release. Talking to me wasn’t any kind of sharing. It was making a scar. It was the kind of thing you would only do if you had to survive. Or to punish.

  17

  The highway dumped into another outside Simmesport, in the old plantation country where blacks outnumbered whites in huge numbers and had suffered proportional repressions. In some places, the faces were as bright and happy as at a Caribbean market; in others there was a density of alienation that could not be penetrated by mere human sight.

  She had not cried while nailing down her newfound history, as she had over her brother’s death. It wasn’t really a crying kind of thing now.

  I found a classical station on the radio, a Beethoven violin concerto.

  “I like that,” she said, finally.

  “We’re quite a pair.”

  “Did you take another Vicodin?”

  “I’m trying not to.”

  “You can if you want. No need to suffer.”

  “I know. But I need to be clear.”r />
  “Well, yeah.”

  “It’s a lot to take in, all that.”

  “I guess I was really going on.”

  “Not really.”

  A short, explosive sound like a laugh came out.

  We drove a few miles in silence. “It’s the first time any of this started to make sense,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I mean how it blew up with Trey and your brother. It makes more sense now.”

  “Jesus, Jack.”

  “What?”

  “What sense does it make that Young Henry is dead? Does it help you to think there was some kind of rational reason? Does that make it okay?” Her face filled with blood again. Her teeth flashed.

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Then what, what ‘sense’?”

  I leaned back against the headrest. “Nothing. I said it wrong. I’ve just been trying, you know, to figure things out.”

  She took a few deep breaths, and her fingers went up along the wheel, as if to signal a truce. “I know. Forget it.”

  “We can’t take this out on each other.”

  “I should know that more than you. It’s what I get paid to know.”

  “Nobody gets paid to know this.”

  “If they did, we’d be rich.”

  We both smiled, wanly. No cash-out for us.

  “I mean, do you have any idea what happens after we get this painting, if we can get it? Does that mean Trey leaves us alone? Does that mean he gets away with murdering my brother? I mean, murdering . . . his own brother. If you wanted to see it that way.” She paused. “And I do.”

  I saw the speedometer moving up past eighty again. I reached across to touch her arm, from comfort. I might have been touching a steel girder.

  “I just mean that things are going to play out. Trey isn’t going to get away with anything.”

  She faintly smiled again, but more like a cobra. I realized she must have been wondering if her new pal, her rib-sore road warrior, would bail. And I didn’t blame her. Human relations very abruptly had become dramatically unglued in her life. But she was now the love of my life and I would never leave her.

  So I told her that. She reached across with her free hand, took mine, and placed it on her breast, over her heart.

  We were in Baton Rouge by early afternoon. I wanted to eat again, so we exited near LSU and found a Vietnamese place near the campus. The town had transformed over the years into a congestion of shopping malls and suburbs and not much of what I remembered. I asked her to drive past my old place off 19th Street, in what was once a very poor black neighborhood where white college kids were tolerated. Elle wondered why I hadn’t lived elsewhere and one truth was that it had been cheap and the other truth was that eventually I got to like it.

  We got back on Highway 61 and in no time were on the outskirts of New Orleans, coming in past the airport. Cars plied the crowded streets in the customary manner, a combination of aggression and disregard for traffic laws. Twice we were almost cut off by smoke-belching wrecks, once by a sleek bronze Infiniti. At stoplights, people waiting for buses in the hot sun seemed to peer into the windows, looking us over.

  Our first task was to find a place to hole up. We had come to where Airline turns into Tulane Avenue, and the seedy motels stretch out like some hard part of LA. I couldn’t see spending my last days there, if that’s what it came to. I told her I knew of a little place Uptown, a private house with a back unit rented off-the-books by a guy named Boots Deshaw, a retired ex-school teacher and part-time musician I’d met once while doing a story on school violence. He’d started his little B&B side business to help with Louisiana’s miserable teacher retirement benefits, but he only rented to music types, and the occasional maverick like me.

  No chance Trey would know about it.

  Before heading there to check it out, we made an impulse decision to drive back out I-10 to Louis Armstrong International. I wanted to switch to a rental car. Maybe unnecessary, but it couldn’t hurt, and it made both of us feel better. We parked in a remote lot, took the shuttle to E-Z Rent ’n Fly and picked out a plain-looking, dark blue Taurus sedan, the kind you’d never think twice about seeing. Then we drove back to the long-term lot and transferred all our stuff out of the Explorer.

  Back in town, Elle, still at the wheel, took Carrollton off the freeway, and cut over toward the river, past Audubon Park, and then to Magazine Street. We wound back a couple more streets toward Tchoupitoulas until I recognized the one I wanted. Boots’s next-door neighbors were on their stoop, drinking beer and watching the passersby, especially anyone who didn’t belong. It was like the Marigny. New Orleans was a city of neighborhoods, and the key to everything was to be grounded in one, or to know someone who was.

  We parked pretty close on the potholed street. I walked up and knocked on the louvered door. No answer. I tried again and after a few very long minutes, Boots opened up. He was about seventy and he still looked good: gray beard, close-cropped fringe of gray hair, jeans and a loose-fitting purple guayabera. It took a moment for him to recognize me. Then he smiled broadly and shook my hand, asked me what I was up to.

  I told him I needed a place for a couple of days with a friend. He asked, perhaps only half-joking, if I’d gotten evicted. I said, no, that they were doing some work at my place and I needed a room until Saturday if it was open. I’m not sure he believed me, but he believed in me so it was okay. The duplex in back, bigger than the garage apartment, was vacant. It was midweek and not the high season yet, and he was glad to get the business.

  We pulled the car into the narrow driveway and took our stuff in. Boots helped, and if he was any more surprised to see me with a beautiful black woman than with a busted-up face, he didn’t say. He did give her an appreciative head-to-toe. Elle chatted with him superficially and then we settled in. It was cozy but not cramped—one small bedroom, a living room with a couple of well-worn sofas, and a clean, stocked kitchen. Every wall was decorated with record albums and photos of Boots and his musician friends from over the years. He played clarinet sometimes at some of the old-school clubs like Donna’s.

  Elle told him it was perfect. He thanked her and invited us to drop by and talk later if we had a chance, then left us alone.

  She went into the bathroom. I finished bringing in a few more things from the car and turned on the window air-conditioner. It was almost November but New Orleans was still a steam bath. I left the shotgun and Colt in the trunk of the Taurus, the Glock still in my duffel. I was so far over the line it didn’t even register that I was sorting out my armory.

  We sat at the Formica-topped table near the kitchen. It was quiet. I noticed an old Sony radio on a window ledge and found my station. It was hard for either of us to sit still. As if that were an option.

  “You want to go get a drink or something?” Elle said, looking at her watch, a mock come-hither look framed with just a glint of hardness and anger. “Do you know a good place around here to take a girl like me?”

  I did.

  18

  It wasn’t a good sign that Elfego wasn’t at the Rio Blanche, but it wasn’t necessarily bad. Could have been his day off. His boss, Quasimodo, subscribed to the negative interpretation.

  “You find the sorry-ass bastard and tell him he comes in tonight or he don’t come back at all.”

  “I don’t know if I can be much help with that.”

  “Maybe she can.”

  “Where do you think he is? Has he been gone long?” she asked.

  “Just since lunch. But I’m two people short as it is and the real estate people are in town. We’re full all the time. So you tell him.”

  He brought the two beers we had ordered.

  “My brother’s a friend of his. We had something to give him.”

  Quasimodo looked her over. Me, even more, especially the purple hue of my fac
e and nose. If he cared, he didn’t let on.

  “Your brother? Knows Elfego?”

  She shrugged.

  “Your brother has a poor choice of friends.”

  “That’s cold, from his boss.”

  “I ain’t his boss. Except when I’m behind the counter. Which I am now and he ain’t here. You want anything else? Chips? Po’ boy?”

  “Just the beers.”

  He wiped the counter in front of us and walked off to the other end of the bar, where he poured two glasses of red wine and gave them to the only waiter on duty: an older guy, white, tanning salon abuser, gray hair in a ponytail—Venice Beach or Key West look but it wasn’t that out of place here, where the nation’s leftovers tend to form up like lines of seaweed on the sand. The two talked briefly, looked our way, said something else, and the waiter went off to deliver his goods to a man and two women at a table near the sidewalk.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “I think we need to find out where Elfego is.”

  I raised my eyebrows in a kind of smartass way but then I saw that she was lost in a thought. She looked beatific in the late afternoon light. “You have an idea.”

  “I’m just trying to remember something Young Henry told me a couple of years ago, about some guy he’d met. He thought it was cool that he had a loft, something around some warehouses.”

  I looked at my beer bottle and tried to think through the city’s neighborhoods. “Maybe it was over by the convention center. But those are expensive for a waiter.”

  “It was a few years back,” she said.

  “Maybe he got a place before the rents shot up.”

  “Or it could be anywhere else. Could be over in the Bywater or Tremé or Ninth Ward for that matter.”

  “Maybe.”