by Haven Kimmel
She walked back to her truck, slung the tire iron across her front seat, slammed her door. Her head hurt and the palms of her hands stung. She backed out of the driveway and turned around in the cul-de-sac, watching the van in her rearview mirror until she got to the corner, but no one ever emerged. The house was completely still, the last Cassie saw of it.
That night, after Belle had settled down in the living room with a book, Cassie went out on the front porch with a beer. If she’d had her gun with her, she would have killed Winnie the Pooh. She could talk to Edwin, she could talk to Bud or Belle, but what could they say that she didn’t already know? She thought about how often it happened that a liar was to two liars born, how tendencies fine or subtle or peculiar thread their way through the genes and out into the world. Her father had an exquisite temper: he was fast, verbally; he struck, he got over it. As a child Cassie never saw it coming, she had to train herself to stay out of the way. When he was on a losing streak, or when he was caught in his own congealing guilt, Laura called him the Mongoose. Cassie took a deep breath, closed her eyes. It had been Laura’s temper that unhinged her daughters. Children are like dogs, Cassie thought, they can adjust to the periodic boot to the ribs, even if it arrives for arbitrary reasons and is followed by a pat on the head, but they don’t know what to do with someone who stays blank and silent and simmering for days on end. Laura’s unhappiness was her religion.
It was a freezing night. Cassie pulled her coat more closely around her, tugged her hat down over her ears. She could see her breath, but the sky was clear and the stars were hard and bright, the beer felt good. A car turned slowly in to the driveway. The driver turned off his lights but left the engine running. “Oh, shit,” Cassie said, putting down her beer. It was a sheriff’s deputy, taking his time about getting out of the car. Cassie knew most of the myriad ways cops abused the general public, and this was one of them, not getting out of the car. She didn’t stand up. The cop could probably see her in the dim yellow glow of the porch light. She could wait as long as he could. When he finally stepped out of the car, Cassie saw it was only Josh Fellers. They’d gone to school together.
Josh closed the heavy car door, then squinted up at the porch. “Cass? You up there?”
“Hey, Josh.”
He walked around and opened the screen door, then sighed and settled down into the splintery rocking chair.
“Don’t scoot around on that chair,” Cassie said, taking another drink of her beer.
“I won’t. I remember it.”
“You want a beer?”
Josh yawned. “I’m on duty. For a few more minutes, anyway.”
“How’s Tracy?”
“She’s good.”
“The girls okay?”
“They’re fine. Growing like weeds. Now, look here, Cassie.” Josh reached down and adjusted the volume on his radio. The dispatcher’s voice, distant and free of emotion, receded. “Strange thing happened today. A woman named Nancy Cobb was driving her dark green Dodge Caravan on Highway 12 when an older Mazda truck, light blue with a camper shell on the back, began following her and followed her all the way home. Right into her driveway. At which time the driver of the truck, a woman she placed in her mid- to late-twenties with long light brown or blond hair, did with malicious intent attack the van, destroying a rear taillight and the driver’s mirror, cracking a side window, and denting the driver’s door.”
“That is interesting,” Cassie said, letting her head fall first toward her left shoulder, then toward her right, popping her neck.
“The driver of the Mazda truck did all of this, and I quote, without provocation.”
“Hmmm.” Cassie shook her head, as if the ways of humanity were mysterious and perverse. “Did she get the plate number? Of the assailant’s truck?”
“Nope. But she says she would sure recognize that assailant, or her truck, in a flat second.”
“So she confronted the attacker? Face-to-face?”
“Mrs. Cobb says she was so terrified that she couldn’t turn her head, that she refused to look at the other woman for fear of making her more angry.”
“She said that?”
Josh nodded. “I wrote it down.”
“Doesn’t sound like she’s got much of a case, if you ask me.” Cassie drank the last of her beer.
“You know of many light blue Mazda trucks in this county, Cass? I ask you. My granddad sold me his old Toyota Tercel, and it got vandalized in the first week because it wasn’t a Ford or a Chevy, buncha damn rednecks. I had to sell it for scrap, and it was a good car.”
“I don’t care what people think about a foreign truck.”
Josh sighed. Every time he moved, his heavy leather belt squeaked, and the shiny surface of his police-issued jacket made a shooshing sound. Cassie could even hear his shoes. How the police ever managed to sneak up on anyone was a puzzle.
“Three days ago there was a report of a scuffle at a car wash in Jonah, in which a man in a Chevy Caprice Classic pulled in behind a light blue Mazda truck, maybe a little too close, and before the driver of the truck was quite finished. The truck backed up and hit the front of the Chevy repeatedly, then drove away.”
Cassie said nothing.
“And yesterday, if I’m not mistaken, around four in the afternoon, you were running through the park, and a man hitting golf balls hit one too close to you, which you then retrieved and winged back at him, hitting him in the thigh. I’ll take that beer now.”
In the kitchen she got out two bottles of beer; passing the living room again, she glanced in at Belle, who had put her book down and was curled up in the brown rocking chair, doing needlepoint.
Josh had taken off his hat. With his flattened hair exposed, he looked more like the boy she’d known in school, his dark eyelashes and the color high in his cheeks. His ears stuck out just like when he was younger, and they blushed before his face did. “Thanks, Cass,” he said, taking the beer. He rested his elbows on his knees, looking out into the dark yard. “In school you fought more than anybody I’ve ever known. You were in trouble more than any boy, I never quite understood it.”
Cassie nodded. “I was a scrapper.”
“But you’re thirty years old now, Cass, and you’ve got some burdens on your shoulders. Reports come into the station about you, my buddies hand them over to me to deal with. I stayed late tonight, missed my kids at dinner, to take this report and come talk to you. I did it because your dad got me out of some jams when I was younger, and Poppy gave me a job when I needed it, and you just lost your mom. And you and me has a history, too. I took y’all’s side in the fight against Jimmy over Poppy’s marker, I went out to the trailer and talked to him and Barbara till they gave it up.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Josh shook his head. “You will always mean something to me.”
Cassie tightened her grip on the beer bottle; she wanted to cry, she wanted to thank Josh and apologize to him, and she also wanted to hit him.
“You got any games coming up?”
“Maybe. There’s a chance of me going to New Orleans tomorrow.”
“Do that,” Josh said, pointing his finger at her. “Get out of town a few days, let me deal with this. Then listen, come back and get rid of that truck, I don’t care how you feel about it. That truck has you marked like a tattoo. Billy’s got a rebuilt Ford Ranger he’ll sell for a song, it’s a salvage title.”
Cassie blinked, clenched her jaw muscles.
“You hear, sweetheart? Let’s fix this.”
Cassie nodded, smiled at him. “Josh? Don’t you think I coulda been a contendah?”
Josh laughed, leaned back in his chair, took a drink of his beer. “That’s for sure,” he said. “You’re sure right about that.”
Belle was doing needlepoint and weeping. She’d make a few stitches, then wipe her eyes on a tissue, then make a few stitches, then blow her nose. Cassie stood in the middle of the room, looking at the couch where Laura used to sit and read with
Belle, they shared a circle of lamplight every evening. Cassie couldn’t sit there, never would, so she sat down on the floor at Belle’s feet. Neither said anything. Cassie wanted to ask, but she wouldn’t, if Belle remembered the fight over Poppy’s gravestone, how no one was sure whether Jimmy would even come to the funeral, if Barbara would let him, since Laura would be there, Cassie and Belle would be there, they were the bereaved parties. And how he had come but stayed at the back of the funeral home, had slipped in and signed his name and slipped out again before his daughters could see him. Laura had made all the arrangements, paid the bill, ordered the stone, and while it was still being engraved, Jimmy had ordered them to stop, to change the inscription. He’d wanted it to say Poppy’s names and dates, and then HUSBAND AND FATHER, RESTING IN THE ARMS OF THE LORD. That had been a rough time, the monument people calling, and Robbie Ballenger calling, finally the police involved. Laura had power of attorney and would have won eventually, but Jimmy stopped. Cassie knew why now. And so Poppy’s stone, in the cemetery with a thousand spring hats, said what Laura had chosen:
Lawrence “Popcorn” Claiborne
1904-1991
An Innocent Man
“I’m going to go to New Orleans,” Cassie said.
Belle sniffed. “I think you should, I’m glad.”
“I’m worried about you, though.”
“Don’t be, Jesus, don’t use me as an excuse not to do it, I was pretty sure that’s what Laura would have done if we’d ever gotten to give her the tickets, she would have said she couldn’t go because she couldn’t leave me.”
“Maybe.”
“No maybe about it, it would have been how she expressed her anger at me, we were her excuse for not going every other year of her life, because she was trapped here taking care of us, I would have been so angry if she’d said it this time, if she’d—” Belle stopped, buried her face in her hands, sobbed.
“Belle,” Cassie said, resting her head against her sister’s knee.
“Goddammit,” Belle said, hiccuped, cried harder.
Cassie stood up, unsure of what to do. Laura would have done nothing, would have let the storm pass. Poppy would have started crying himself. Edwin would have patted Belle on the back, to no effect. Jimmy would have grabbed his keys, here’s your hat, what’s your hurry. Cassie was on her own here. She bent down, slipped one arm under Belle’s knees, the other behind her back, and lifted her straight up; she weighed nothing, her bones were like a kitten’s bones. Cassie gathered Belle, crying on and on, then she sat down in the rocking chair, holding Belle against her like a baby. The room was quiet but for Belle’s agonized breathing, her sobs. Cassie rocked, rubbed Belle’s back, whispered, her own eyes filled with tears, Are you very very sad?
SHADOW FATHER
Cassie chose a guest house outside the Quarter, cheap, painted in a breezy blue that reminded her of a dollhouse Belle had loved as a child. A gift from Laura. The dollhouse, detailed and accurate, sat for a while on a round table in the corner of the living room, its color a surprise against the pervasive blandness of a room that didn’t allow for light. At the guest house the owners, sisters named Marcelle and Martine, asked her if she wanted the best room, and without thinking, she said yes; the view from the balcony was of a courtyard so lush and green, the bricks of the walkways were being pushed up out of the ground. In the center a banana tree grew up then sideways, and its branches were heavy with young fruit, each layered against the others like artichoke leaves, smaller than you’d find in a supermarket. Cassie shook her head at such a sight. A banana tree. She remembered an evening a few years ago, sitting late at night around the kitchen table with Belle and Laura, when Belle confessed her ongoing, pervasive fear of water; how she dreamed at night of swimming, and seeing below her body a massive shadow moving slowly.
“But that is—surely you recognize—” Laura began.
“Of course I do, but in this case there’s a marriage of the image and the truth, which is that water is an element in which we cannot breathe, and compared to that, the fact of the enormous creatures with their tiny brains who want to shake us like rag dolls and then eat us is secondary.” Belle had been wearing, Cassie recalled, special gloves lined with medicine, to treat her eczema and keep her from scratching.
“Oh, I see,” Laura had said, leaning back in her chair. “And just where were you born? The air?”
Cassie had laughed the hardest, although she couldn’t have said why, and even now a sound escaped her throat. But Laura had been right: they were children born in the air, under the flat sky and in sight of the bleak horizon of Indiana. They didn’t know heights (except for native trees, and even those were not so tall) or depths. They knew distances, and farmland, the taming of fecundity. Chopping down trees, pulling up stumps, eliminating rocks, plowing and tilling, irrigating; where she lived, they stood so far from what the land had been—an unbroken forest covering the entire Midwest—that barely a trace of the old existed.
But here, and Cassie could feel it right away (if you couldn’t feel it, the chamber of commerce would explain it a thousand different ways), the ancient miasma suffused every stone and every breath. This was some comfort to Cassie, who felt that at any moment something in her own blood would rise up, that she would turn a corner and find Laura resurrected, too young to have met her own fate.
* * *
The air in New Orleans before Easter was so mild it felt like a kiss; hard to imagine, at least in April, the summers Laura used to describe. The temperatures sometimes reached 112, with humidity soup-thick. Drunks used to lie down on the blazing sidewalks and not get up. Laura had stepped over dozens of prone men in her early life, which will prepare one, she liked to say, for the future.
Cassie walked toward Bourbon Street. In the early evening the town felt like any other but more beautiful and more cherished. In a bookstore in the Atlanta airport, she had leafed through a guidebook to Los Angeles, drawn in by the small book’s unusual size and cover. The author had chosen to focus on the more prurient lives of the city’s inhabitants. There had been plenty to say, but what struck Cassie most was the way each entry ended with: “The hotel in which-----killed himself in such an unusual manner was itself an oddity; built in 1889, it had three separate towers, and the interior of each was wrapped in dark virgin oak and trimmed with gold leaf. Today it is a parking lot.” The mansion of the couple who lent the town the name Hollywood is today a parking lot. The early studios: parking lots. The drugstores where starlets languished: parking lots. Not so in New Orleans. Cassie passed a bar that seemed to be tucked into an old blacksmith’s shop, and antebellum houses, French architecture, Spanish architecture; she smelled again the cloud of age that hovered over everything. And something else, another undercurrent. She passed the two-story and three-story buildings that had been made into apartments, glancing at their picturesque doors. Most of the doors seemed to be fetching by accident: this one because someone in 1928 had painted it a shocking red and never painted it again. Or this one, with frames of colored glass in clashing tones that would have disturbed the neighbors and been instantly regretted. Most everything ages well, it seemed to Cassie, studying the way the glass had faded unevenly. Even what we most despise in our own time becomes the relic of the lost and is treasured by the later in line. The fires of Time, Time itself, and behind Something, a door, the repository of all those events. There had been so much in Laura’s journals, scraps, intuitions. Cassie had spent a long time reading a particular piece called “Acquisitions”:
Every day the new is made, the novel.
And I read the lists and acquire, it is
my job. Boxes arrive. I empty them,
display them center stage, most
go unnoticed, grow dusty, and are
carried up one flight of stairs. Another
floor. And later another. At the highest
point they are wholly ignored,
no eyes ascend. Nothing is left
in the end but the
elevator down
to the basement, the boxes rotating
by age toward the janitor’s
hands, the fire. Upstairs, I acquire.
Laura had not been a building; she had been the city on which her daughters were built, and what had been under the city was labyrinthine and had no map. They had taken it for granted, Cassie and Belle, that they would turn on a faucet and water would pour into their hands. But where did it come from? Where did it go? When something went wrong, they didn’t dare descend to fix it. Laura, underground. No one moved behind those closed red doors, no one came or went.
* * *
The photo gallery was a stall for time until she was inside it, and then she stayed over an hour. In her notebook she wrote down some of the prints she saw, to tell Belle. Jackie Kennedy in her pink Chanel suit, Marilyn Monroe’s wedding to Joe DiMaggio, John and Yoko, every beautiful and strange event made more poignant for having been photographed. And political scenes: George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bill Clinton playing a saxophone in dark sunglasses. The gallery had what was surely the largest collection of jazz photographs anywhere: Billie Holiday in a curl of smoke, Miles Davis covered with sweat, Thelonious Monk in his dome of a hat, everyone Laura had worshiped. Looking at the pictures, Cassie could almost hear again “Strange Fruit,” “So What,” “Mysterioso,” the songs Laura mourned for. A woman working there told Cassie there was an upstairs, too, and to look around. What was upstairs was even more astonishing: part of Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men series, Eudora Welty’s Mississippi photographs, photographs dating all the way back to 1917. There were original hand printed Bellocqs, or so the cards said, two of his young prostitutes. A lynching tree.
A man beside her said, “You visiting?” He had a kind face, middle-aged, a wide smile.
“Yes. Do you work here?”
“Too much. I own the place.”
Cassie looked at the wall. “I don’t know much about photography.”
“Do you know what you like?” He had a lot of laugh lines around his eyes; he wore a vest woven from wool in many different colors.