South, America

by Rod Davis

  Elfego coughed, so much that his friend gave him a wad of cocktail napkins into which to hack up the blood.

  “He needs to go to the hospital. Or a doctor,” I said.

  “I told him,” said Ponytail. “You see how he minds me.”

  “Is he taking something?”

  “Hell yes. I have an extensive pharmacy in my bathroom. Right now it’s Percodan.”

  “Good stuff.”

  “We may move into something more serious. Of course, he’s having some trouble zoning in, as you can maybe tell.”

  “Fuck you,” Elfego said, throwing the bloody napkins to the floor. “They didn’t hurt me that bad.”

  We all exchanged glances of disbelief.

  “I have to go back,” Elfego said to his friend, negating his own bravado. “Give it to her.”

  Ponytail—I guess we had all concluded no one needed to know his name—reached into his pocket and then slid his cupped hand to our side of the table. He dropped something and moved his hand back.

  She looked at me, and silently conveyed once again an apology for accusing me of taking the necklace from Terrell’s body.

  “Nobody asked me about it,” Elfego shrugged. “So I didn’t bring it up.”

  Elle reached to take the tangled strand of silver.

  “Look, I knew he was meeting Trey. He was going to try to get some money from him somehow. He didn’t tell me how. I’m not his fucking banker.”

  “When did he give you this?” she asked.

  “At the bar, that night.” He looked at me, clicked his tongue mockingly. “See, I don’t have to tell you everything, gringo. By the way, what the fuck happened to you?”

  “I ran into a door.”

  He sneered. “Lots of doors out there these days.”

  “I’d say.”

  “The door. Name of Trey Barnett?”

  “Close friends.”

  Finally Elfego smiled. I could see blood on his teeth.

  “So he gave you this?” Elle continued. “That night, when he was there with Trey.”

  “He just said to hang onto it until he got back from wherever they were going and if he didn’t come back, to make sure you got it. But you know, that little queenie could be soooo dramatic.” He coughed again.

  “You could have given it to Jack right away. Or called me,” she said.

  Elfego sneered, as best his mouth would let him. “Maybe I wasn’t sure.” He let that set just long enough, looked at her directly enough, that it seemed true. “Maybe it was the last thing he ever gave me. Maybe I didn’t know who to trust with it, no matter what he said. Or why.” He dabbed at the tooth blood, the sneer softened to something else. “I guess now it’s different. So . . .”

  Ponytail put his arm around his friend. “We have to go.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Elle let the necklace play through her fingers. “So, did my brother say anything about where he put that painting he wanted me to have?”

  “You gonna tell me what the hell it is?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Did Trey say anything?”

  “While his coños were holding me down and kicking me?”

  “I’m sorry. I just wondered if you knew. You know, I’m trying to get around this.”

  “I don’t know shit about it other than it gets people killed. Maybe the two of you.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Elle reached for his hand again. This time he let her cover it and squeeze it. They looked at each other a moment. Only they knew what they shared.

  “I’m glad you got away. That was lucky,” she said.

  “It wasn’t lucky. I just hit that shit in the face with the door when we went outside and took off. I know the streets around there better than they did.”

  “Whatever it was, I mean I’m glad. And I’m sorry about it. We didn’t know he’d be heading your way.”

  “You’re not my guardian.”

  “No,” I interjected, maybe a little too strong.

  Ponytail exchanged a look with Elfego I couldn’t decipher.

  “If it wasn’t for this little chica here,” Elfego said, shifting his attention with clear demarcations from Ponytail to Elle, then me, “I wouldn’t have tried so hard to not tell them anything. Not that I knew anything.”

  Elle squeezed his hand more and said, “Go somewhere for a while. Go to a hospital.” To Ponytail: “Take care of him. Too many people drowning in all this misery right now.” Her eyes seemed to sharpen even in the barroom light. “Too much of it from the same person.”

  Elfego looked down at the table and I realized he was having trouble with focus.

  Elle toyed with the necklace a moment longer, then clasped it in her fist. “We’d better go, too,” she said.

  Elfego coughed, and we all stood up. Elle and I walked ahead, with Elfego and Ponytail close behind, so they’d be less visible as we exited. It was a good thing it was late and the patrons were hammered because we must have looked like a hobbling freak show.

  I’m not sure where Elfego and Ponytail went but I hoped it was to the hospital. Elfego had taken it hard on our behalf. He didn’t seem to like me much and I wasn’t sure about him, but I admired his toughness. Same as I did Terrell’s, the more I learned of what he had done for his sister.

  After a minute or so we stepped out into the street, warm and humid after the icy air conditioning in the bar. We drove back to Boots’s to sleep during what was left of the night, and for Elle to tell me what she had seen in that necklace.

  I took half a Vicodin before settling slowly into bed. She lay next to me and started to tell me about the necklace, about what was in the locket engraved with the initials “THM.” I tried to listen, but the Vicodin worked fast. Her words floated away in my vision of the delight of her body so close to me, of my hand resting on her thigh like it was its natural place in the order of the universe. I tried to come back to focus, to remember that our long quest had brought us to the grail, but it was lights out for the knight.

  20

  The electric clock radio said 10:09 when I woke up. Later than I would have guessed. Yet again, it was hard to rally my body. I wanted nothing better than to pop another Vicodin and zone out. But we had less than forty-eight hours. Right now our only lead was draped in a coil of silver chain on the nightstand next to my side of the bed. Recuperation was not an option. I managed to sit up.

  Elle was still asleep. I went to the kitchen, found a bag of Community Coffee, and started a brew. I thought a hot shower might help, so I took one, hoping not to wake her. She needed the rest as much as I did. I dug out a pair of clean jeans and a fresh camp shirt from my bag. The coffee was ready by the time I managed to get dressed. I found some brown sugar in a small Mason jar.

  I tiptoed into the bedroom for the note in the locket and took it back to the kitchen table. Most of what Elle had been saying last night was still hazy, but I knew the one word on the paper had to do with the secret language she and her brother had used as kids. She said it would take a little while for her to remember how it worked, but it had seemed to relax her thinking about it.

  I left the puzzle-word on the table and walked to the rear window to look out into the back yard. Lush and green, surrounded by high bamboo, not unlike the garden at my own place in the Marigny. I had all but forgotten about that part of me. Elle was right: I was living as though each new day brought me a home wherever I was, and that there was no settled place beyond that.

  I decided to check my voicemail again. I’d left my cell in the car, but the duct-taped white wall phone in the kitchen was fine. I got a dial tone and only minimal static, and listened through the messages: a callback from Ray Oubre, a check-in from a friend back in Dallas wondering “what the hell you were up to,” and something about changing my long distance carrier. Last was another call from
Art Becker saying they would be in Atlanta a few days or a week, but that he thought I should try to check in as soon as I could or let me know if I wanted him to go in and look around before they left. In his voice was a tinge of concern, even though he was trying to hide it.

  I poured another half-cup for myself and picked out a clean mug from the cabinet over the sink. I had to wake her up. If what she said was right, that the note in the locket would lead us to the painting, it was time to get there.

  In the bedroom, I put her coffee on the nightstand and touched her arm. She opened her eyes slowly.

  “It’s late.”

  She looked at me as though coming back from somewhere not of this world. “I woke up about four.” Her voice molasses-thick. “Bad dream. I couldn’t get back to sleep for a while, so I took one of your pills.”

  I bent down to kiss her. Her lips were there but not much else.

  “And now you can’t wake up.”

  “You were right. They take you out.”

  “It’s okay. That’s what they’re for.”

  She smiled in what in other circumstances could have been called “serenely.”

  “What was the dream?”

  “Nothing.” She looked away. “It was bad.”

  I sat on the side of the bed, reached out to touch her check lightly. “How bad?”

  She sat up, pulling the sheet across her nakedness.

  “I don’t know, Jack.”

  “Can you remember any of it?”

  “A little.”

  “Mine usually go away.”

  “Yeah. Well, it’s my line of work to figure out what dreams mean. Not to lose them.”

  “They get lost.”

  “Hmmm.”

  The fingers of her left hand barely grazed mine.

  “I was back in my house in Tuscaloosa. They were in there with me.”

  She drew her hand back and adjusted herself a little in the bed. I watched her closely.

  “I just lay there next to you, watching you sleep. And all I could think about was that I felt like I couldn’t even take it all in. Like being awake was the dream. Like the dream was at least something with a beginning and an end.”

  “We’re going to make it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “When I was making coffee, it came to me. At least Big Red has faith in us. You know?”

  “Or he’d have killed us.”

  “Or he’d have killed me. Maybe not you.”

  “You know that’s the way it would go.”

  She didn’t say anything for a few moments and I realized she was looking down at my jeans. “Jack. What’s the matter with you?” She feigned shock.

  I glanced down, too. Impossible, given the way I felt physically.

  “Maybe some other time,” she said, reaching across to flick away the erection like a hospital nurse. “I need to get dressed.”

  “You do.”

  I moved away from the bed and she got up. I had noticed that with Elle the darkness and the light could change places in an instant.

  At the bathroom door she stopped, looked at the nightstand. “Where’s the—”

  “It’s in the kitchen.”

  She gave me a long appraisal. “Why?”

  “I tried reading it again. Hell, it’s not even a word.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. I’m just dying to get your translation. So to speak.”

  She made a dismissive noise, and went into the shower.

  “And put some clothes on,” I called out.

  When she was ready we walked up to Magazine to a corner coffee shop. We could have driven but my body needed to move. I was going to try to get by without the meds if I could.

  It was chilly, which didn’t help the ribs or muscles. A mild norther had come in overnight. I really needed to start paying attention to the weather and the world around us. At first I hobbled along, but it got better after the first block. I couldn’t do much about the appearance of my nose or the discoloration on my face. A ball cap and shades figured to be a part of my wardrobe for the foreseeable future.

  We ordered Mexican coffees and a cranberry muffin for her and a ham and cheese croissant for me and found a table in the far end of the café. I told her about my voicemail. I said I wanted to go by my place after all. My “home,” I believe I called it. We decided it would be okay to do so. Maybe a good thing to do.

  We took a couple bites of our food and then she took the necklace from her bag, laid it on the table, and smoothed out the note so we could study its one word: “Possmp.”

  I rolled my eyes and put a huge piece of croissant in my mouth.

  She dug in her bag. “Damn. Do you have a pen?”

  Veteran journalist that I was, of course I didn’t. But I saw a yellow pencil on the table next to ours.

  She frowned at the teeth marks and “Geaux Tigers” logo.

  “At least those are words that make sense,” I said.

  “Something to write on, too.”

  Up again to pick up a flyer for a local band off a stack near a bulletin board. She smoothed the note again, studied the word, then wrote it out at the top of the blank side of the flyer.

  She scribbled some numbers under the word. Then she scratched them out. Then she put a new group of numbers in a horizontal line under each letter of the word. Each number corresponded to the letter above it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Drink your coffee.” She was actually smiling.

  She had written: 16, 1, 3, 3, 3, 0.

  She looked at it for several moments, then scribbled more numbers to one side. Those, she scratched them out. She repeated that process a few times and finally she put down the sequence she seemed to like, directly under the first one.

  She turned the paper so I could read it without bending my head. The lower sequence read: 16, 15, 19, 19, 13 and 16.

  She was beaming like a first-grader.

  “A combination.”

  “It was a game we played when we were kids. You start with the first letter and whatever number that represents in the alphabetical sequence. Then each one after that is how many that letter is from the first letter in the word. And it spells something. The first one to guess the word, wins.”

  I looked at what she’d written, like it made any sense to me.

  “We used to try to see how much of it we could do in our heads without missing. Young Henry was quick with numbers and he liked puzzles. He almost always beat me. He could even beat Daddy. But he always made it so much fun nobody cared, and we all expected to lose anyway.” She looked away briefly. “And now he’s gone.”

  “It’s for a mail box? Or storage box somewhere?”

  “Could be.”

  “But you have two rows there. Which one is it?”

  “Which looks more like a mailbox combination to you?”

  “The one on the bottom, sort of.”

  “Me, too. We had a second way to play the game that was easier, for when we just wanted to play as fast as we could, like in the car. You just use the number that corresponds to the position of the letter in the alphabet. You don’t have to measure it from the first letter each time. It usually gives you more double digits so it can be little harder to do in a hurry in its own way.”

  I studied the numbers. Whatever. “So he went the second route.”

  “Yeah. But he had to do it backwards. See? He made a word out of the numbers on the lock. I guess they didn’t really make a real word. It’s a preset combination.” She looked at it. “Possmp. He was trying for possum, I guess. Or” —she cocked her head— “possible map? Hey, I like that one better.”

  “Definitely.”

  “It’s our possible map.”

  “Possibly a possum.”

  She
looked at me.

  I looked at the numbers again.

  “What? You’re checking me?”

  I kept looking at the sequences. “Yeah. I see it. Even if Trey got this paper, he wouldn’t know what it meant.”

  “You think Elfego looked at it?”

  “Maybe, but he wouldn’t know what it meant, either.”

  “Either way he saved it for you.”

  “Yeah.” She put the pencil down. A couple of Tulane co-eds came by, carrying a tray of coffee and assorted goodies. They sat a few tables over and began talking about a concert at Snug Harbor.

  I looked at the paper. “You’re sure about this.”

  “I am.”

  “Because I’m not sure if I really get it. Not really.”

  “But I do.”

  “I believe you. Doesn’t matter. The trick is to know what this opens.”

  She put her hand on top of mine.

  “I know that, too. Or at least where.”

  I’m sure unbelief, if not incredulity, telegraphed from my expression.

  “He was my brother, you know.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I know his habits.”

  I smiled, took a long drink of my coffee.

  “You know where Broad is, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where on Broad?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  We got up from the table. Outside, on the sidewalk, she stopped me.

  “You don’t believe me. Admit it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Liar.”

  She kissed me, just enough not to hurt. We walked back to get the car. She kissed me again, pinched me on the butt. Actions that could be described as playful. But it wasn’t about me. And it wasn’t about anything in the present. If I had to guess, I would say it was summer in Rosedale, decades ago, when time had yet to manifest.

  21

  Broad Street is a busy crosstown thoroughfare where you can find anything from a beauty shop to a liquor store. For our immediate purposes, it also was home to Mid Town Pack ’n’ Mail, where you could dispatch via UPS or Fed Ex and where people like Elle, who needed a local delivery address for her business correspondence, might keep a rented mail drop. And where a brother who emulated his older sister in all practical matters could do the same, should the need arise.