South, America

by Rod Davis

  He shrugged.

  “Let’s say your boss gets this. You think he’ll get it back to the owner? Maybe put it in a museum? You know, take care of it?”

  “That’s the question?”

  I slid the inner box into the outer, resealed the tape.

  “Just asking.”

  He looked at me in a way that very nearly reminded me of conscientious.

  “I got one for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What she said about what this is worth. That’s straight up?”

  “Her brother told her. He knew about art. Taught it in school, I think.”

  “He did all this to keep Barnett from taking down his sister?”

  “That’s the way I see it.”

  I propped it against the wall.

  “Back there, she just lost it?”

  “You know, on top of killing her brother, he raped her.”

  “Raped her?”

  “When they were in college.”

  “Shit Leroy,” He reached for the box. “Give me a hand. I don’t want to drop this damn thing.” We started out. “And you just walked in on the whole thing.”

  “I found her brother’s body. It all went from there.”

  We stopped in the hall while I flicked off the light, locked the unit.

  “Where now?”

  “Back to my truck. You’ll drop me off. I need to get back to the coast.”

  We hurried outside to get the painting in the trunk before the rain started up again. I had thrown an old plaid road blanket from the Explorer into the trunk of the Taurus when we had transferred our stuff and grabbed it for Lenora after getting the painting storage box secure. Driving away, I felt strangely like celebrating, although it was far from over. Coltrane was on the radio. “A Love Supreme.” Barely audible, Lenora whispered the words and huddled against Elle for warmth.

  The Ford F-250 pickup was parked along a back street in the warehouse district near the convention center, where Red had met Tony. Red said it was as close as he could find at the time. I pulled into a space nearby, partly blocking an unloading driveway but we wouldn’t be there long.

  Elle pulled the note from her brother from her bag and read off to Red the name and address for the Beldon Gallery in Houston. He wrote the information on a pad he kept in his front pocket, looked at it a couple of times to be sure it was right and repeated the phone number. It had come to him how much it was worth. I think it also was coming more and more to him the scope of what Trey had nearly pulled off.

  “The decent thing to do, if that means anything to you, would be to get this Guadalupe to a big art museum,” Elle said, leaning up close to Red. “If it goes to your boss, it’ll be lost to the world, you know?” She seemed ready to say something else but didn’t.

  Red turned to look at her, then me. “You knew what you were getting yourself into?”

  I managed a half-smile.

  “I know what you mean, darlin’,” he told her. “It really is something. Like I said to Shakespeare here, damndest thing I’ve ever seen outside of a church.” He cleared his throat. “Thing is, it’s not my call.”

  She stared out the side window.

  “But I’ll bring it up. You know, if it could play out that way, business-wise.”

  It was a close as he could get to acknowledging his debt to her. That he even had a human side was something that amazed me, especially considering the state of my body, which was starting to reassert its right to remind me it had become a punching bag. In a weird way I had started to like him. Stockholm syndrome, maybe, but there was something about him I respected, and apparently vice versa. Not that it would stop him from killing me whenever he wanted. Business-wise.

  The rain had started up again on the drive over, though not hard and wind-driven like before. The painting was protected in its wrapping inside the cardboard box. I helped him carry it to his truck and stow it carefully in the extend-a-cab compartment. Red closed the door. I looked at the box through the window. It was a long way from belonging to me, but I felt a little protective.

  “Art class is over. Let it go.”

  “I know.” A car came by slowly, filled with young women, probably looking for a parking space to head out clubbing.

  “So I’ll be hearing from your friend in a few months.”

  “You will. Same number?”

  “If it changes I’ll find you.”

  I almost shook hands but that was going too far.

  “How’s your ribs?”

  “They hurt.”

  “Coulda been worse.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Now?”

  “Now. Later.”

  “Now, I think we need to get Lenora to a doctor.”

  “That was bullshit, what he did.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So all that back at the gallery. It’ll be gone?” I needed to ask.

  I think he understood. “Probably already is. Or will be soon. Some people, that’s what they do for us in some places. New Orleans is one of those places.”

  “What about Reggie?”

  “What about him?”

  “You trust him?”

  “No.”

  I wiped rain off my forehead, tried to see into his eyes. He wasn’t going to say it any more directly.

  “So this is it, then.”

  “You haven’t answered.”

  “What?”

  “What after this? After the hospital? You and the chick. Elle. She’s all right.”

  “She is.”

  “You gonna stay with her?”

  I looked down at the pavement. A couple more cars passed by.

  “The thing is, if we do, or whatever we do, do I have to worry about”—I paused— “you know, anything?”

  Red leaned against the truck, looked up, the rain splattering his face like something almost holy.

  “Again. What are you going to do?”

  I looked at him. “You mean other than Elle?”

  “Like for a living.”

  “I told you. I’m a writer. Pretty much.”

  He smiled and shook his head.

  I had to laugh myself. “Okay. So I’m not so sure anymore.”

  “‘To be and not to be’ shit?”

  Caught me a little by surprise.

  “Saw the movie.”

  “Hunh.”

  “Myself, I got ‘to be’ doing something, I’m not working. My ex told me reading would be good for me. I even joined a book club up in Memphis.”

  “Yeah?” I kept looking at him. For what, I didn’t know.

  “But it didn’t work out.” His eyes glanced away as if he were remembering something and considering whether to share. “Still, I take stuff when I’m fishing. I like that guy, Robicheaux, the coonass.”

  “Yeah. He’s good.”

  “I saw that movie, too.”

  “Yeah, that was good.”

  “Yeah.”

  We stood there a moment, probably each trying to figure what was going on in the head of the other. At least I was.

  “Well,” he sniffed, then spat, “since you don’t seem to have a fucking plan, my point was, you ever need some odd work now and then, you let me know. You’re not much with your hands but you got some balls. And smarts. You started a fire-fight back there, I’d of walked in on a lot of bodies. Hell, even your woman has balls.”

  I knelt down, picked up a pebble, flicked it out into the street. “I’m not in your league.”

  I looked up. His expression was somewhere between wistful and a scowl. “You was, though, once upon a time, weren’t you? You think you hide it but you don’t.”

  “I outgrew all that.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”<
br />
  We sort of laughed.

  “It’s not like we go to college and get a degree in muscle. You follow orders, it all works out.”

  A flicker of lightning came from upriver. I stood up.

  “Hell, now it’s really coming down.”

  “Yeah.” Then a thunderclap off in the distance.

  We looked at each other, run out of things to say. He really was a big guy.

  “See ya.”

  “See ya.”

  I went back to the rental car and he got into his truck. I waited for him to pull out, and watched until he got up to the corner. Then I started my own engine.

  “So we’re done?” she asked from the back seat.

  “We’re done.”

  I could hear her breathe out. “You got anything left?”

  “Not much.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “What about Lenora?”

  “Pills knocked her right out.”

  “Where do we go? Charity?”

  “We can’t do that. When you were getting the painting, she asked if we could take her back to Jackson. Tonight. She has friends there, the kind who don’t ask questions, and a doctor like we had in Rosedale.”

  “It’s what, three hours, about?” I looked across the seat at her.

  “It’s pain, mostly. You know, she didn’t bleed that much. Did you see her fingertips? They’re cauterized. Same iron he put on her back.”

  I felt my head drop and closed my eyes. Like Elle, I wasn’t interested in absorbing it all right now.

  “So can you drive that far tonight? It’s late.”

  I pulled forward into the rain-pelted street. “I’m okay. We’ll get some coffee. You?”

  “I’m wide awake.”

  A big Japanese sedan appeared behind me and started to take my space, then, seeing the one Red had left, made a beeline for it.

  I picked up a street taking us to I-10 and eventually to I-55 out past Kenner and the airport. I turned on the heater for a half hour until it and our bodies dried out the dampness in our clothes. Then it was too hot and I turned it off, let in fresh air. I could hear Lenora’s ragged breathing. I picked up a station playing classical.

  We drove on into the deep, wet forests and glistening empty highways of the Southern night, nothing out there more real than everything in here.

  “I guess those Red Gators will go up in value,” Elle said, after a while.

  31

  The rain must have been coming in from the north because it stayed with us most of the way, off and on, hard. After an hour or so, just enough for the wipers to come on at intervals. Radio stations faded in and out, but kept me awake. We talked enough to remind ourselves we were alive and well, but otherwise it was a good night for quiet. I kept replaying the scene at the gallery and it never got any less gruesome or more explainable.

  Lenora snored softly, jerked a couple of times but never really woke up. I stopped twice at convenience store gas stations for coffee, and some cashews to keep up my blood sugar. One of the clerks gave a long look to my soiled clothes but for all she knew those could be wine stains, and a disheveled late-night traveler in rural Mississippi wasn’t really an extraterrestrial event.

  It was nearly three when we hit the outskirts of Jackson, too late to call anyone to stay. We didn’t want to go to Lenora’s place right away, so I found a chain motel not far from downtown and booked two adjoining rooms. I told the clerk we’d gotten a late start from Mobile and apologized for my appearance and for waking her up. As if she cared one way or the other as long as I had a credit card.

  I carried Lenora inside and put her on one of the queen beds. Elle followed with a couple of bags. Elle took her aunt’s pulse and watched her to be sure she was resting well. I went into the second room to shower and change and put my gallery clothes in a motel laundry sack. Elle did the same in Lenora’s room, and borrowed one of my T-shirts for a nightgown.

  We sat on the bed next to Lenora, watching her, but we both started nodding off. Elle said it would be better to stay close to her for the night and so we both just lay back on the thick motel pillows. She pushed up next to me and we held each other as though some part of the earth were falling from under us. For a few hours, a few hours of an oblivion I had never so welcomed, we slept.

  In the morning we went down into the old Farish Street neighborhood and found the clinic where Lenora knew a doctor named Benares who attended her wounds without unnecessary questions. He said she could get cosmetic surgery later for her fingers, and maybe the scar on her back if she wanted. We had been living off the radar for so long that it didn’t even seem odd to discuss such matters.

  We stayed at the motel the next two days, Lenora and Elle in one room, me in the other. All of us slept a lot, watched HBO. I picked up our meals and brought them back. I called the rental car company to extend my contract. I checked my machine, nothing new except someone still wanting to be my new long distance provider. I called for Art Becker, which I’d forgotten to do despite my promise to Elle. They still weren’t back from their trip. I did a wash so we’d have clean clothes. I threw away the bloody ones.

  We made two trips back to see Dr. Benares to change the bandages and check the progress of the burn. He told her she was very lucky and that he would drop by to see her once she was back home to follow up.

  I was feeling better, too. The switch to Advil was working well enough, although at night I took the prescription stuff.

  I missed Elle, lying in the room by myself, drifting in and out of sleep. Once, when we were next to each other on the bed, Lenora asleep, we thought about sneaking over into my room, but it was just a thought. I brought up Rose, but Elle changed the subject so quickly I knew it would have to wait.

  On the third day Lenora said she was ready to go home. Late that morning we stopped by a place near Millsaps College for coffee. It had a patio and Lenora wanted to sit outside. She said she hadn’t seen the sun in too long. She told us a little about life in Jackson and we worked out how we would get the birth certificate.

  Lenora’s was a nice bungalow near the campus, two brick columns on a big open porch in front, a weathered oak tree for shade. I remarked on it, that she must have some rich clients. She said she also knew her way around the Dow Jones.

  Elle asked to stay with her aunt one more day to be sure she was settled in on her own and not just pretending to be better. I made a crack that no one thought was amusing about it running in the family. For dinner, I went to a nearby deli for takeout sandwiches and salads. We ate perfunctorily, like people on a trip who’d spent too much time together. Like balloons losing air.

  Later in the evening, sitting on the wicker chairs in the back porch, it all came out. It had hurt beyond words when they used the knife to cut first one finger, then another, and put the hot iron to the tips. She was already numb from the pain when they stripped her naked and put the steam iron on her back—Black and Decker, a weird detail she couldn’t shake—and that was when she told them about Rose.

  She said it was just like Trey had said, that she thought telling him might keep him from killing Elle. That he wouldn’t kill the mother of his child if he knew the child was still alive. That otherwise, no matter what she confessed, he would have killed Elle anyway. Then she passed out, and when she woke up she was in the gallery, not the back of that van. And then we had showed up. And the mob.

  She told Elle that there had been nothing else for it after that, that Trey was a dead man no matter what. That in a way, dying at Elle’s hand was the kindest way he could have gone, that it was probably the most loving thing that had ever happened to him.

  Then she said that it was important for us to be cleaned, and blessed.

  In the back yard, sheltered by the shrubs and high wooden fences, we stood inside a ring of several candles on the ground. Lenora had rubbed oranges over
our heads and bodies to cleanse us and now we waited for her to come back from a shed near the back of the house. It was late and the good Christian neighbors slept under the Mississippi moon, blissfully unaware of secret voudou gardens and pagan ceremonies.

  Lenora came back carrying two pigeons bound up with string. She pulled off their heads and used their blood to dab an encircled cross on both our foreheads. It looked a little like a vévre. Then she passed the bodies of the birds over each of us, head to toe, and threw them to the side.

  She chanted a prayer to the African gods and dotted our foreheads with the sacrificial blood. She told us to pray in whatever manner we chose. We should ask to be cleansed and healed of our sins and also of our deeds and our thoughts; for no matter how justified, we had taken lives and harmed others.

  The moon rose in a half circle through the misty clouds. Looking closely at Elle, Lenora said she wanted to do another reading. She took out her broken coconut husks, threw them several times, speaking to the husks, or maybe just to herself. Finally she gathered them, looked at both of us.

  “The spirits say you will move past this. They won’t tell me more.”

  “What about Rose?”

  Lenora threw the coconut pieces again, a few more times. Finally she shook her head. “Rose can’t reach you now. The spirits won’t let her.”

  Elle touched the blood marking on her forehead.

  “Too much dark in you right now.”

  She tasted the blood on her finger. “But they will.”

  “They will if you let them.”

  “Throw again.”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “You did before.”

  “I wasn’t sure what I was hearing. Now I am. You got a heavy load, baby. It’s not the time for you to make that connection now.”

  Elle shook her head and walked away a few steps. I left it between them.

  Back inside we followed Lenora’s instructions. Elle bathed in the tub in Lenora’s room and I used the hall bathroom shower. Each of us had a half-gallon plastic jug, filled with a thin, milky liquid that smelled of smoke. I poured it over myself and rinsed off. Elle soaked in it in the tub.

  We slept separately. We were supposed to rise in the morning with a prayer on our lips before making any other sound. I didn’t have one. Couldn’t form the words. I don’t know about Elle.