by Haven Kimmel
Cassie stood, for a moment she just stood there. She took a deep breath, nodded at Alan, his hands still crossed over his belly, then walked back to the guest house, where she called home to tell Belle she was there and safe, something she’d never done before.
The next morning she chose a coffee shop just outside the Quarter, on Magazine Street, by the smell outside. Inside, the decor was vaguely Cuban, the ceilings were high, and an antique roaster sat in the corner, the brass so shiny it mirrored the bar where she sat. She ordered a black coffee from her server, a sullen young person of indeterminate gender. Cassie had never before confronted someone whose sex wasn’t immediately apparent; this child was of medium height and very thin; his/her hair was dyed a dull blue and gathered into two small doughnuts above the ears. His lower lip, eyebrow, and nose were all pierced, and his ears sported so many studs and rings, he could have emerged from the hail of an industrial staple gun. His eyes and lips were dark with makeup, and his fingernails were painted alternately red and black (chipped and fading), but his voice, when he took Cassie’s order, was that of a young girl, and she walked like a girl. In her black pants and loose white shirt, there was neither the evidence nor absence of hips or breasts.
Cassie took her notebook out of her backpack and reviewed the notes she’d made reading Laura’s journals and letters, and after talking to Uncle Bud. The first sip of her coffee was good but burned her tongue. She twirled a pencil around and through her fingers, a habit she’d picked up from her father, and considered that all of her mother’s life had been lived in the same sort of alienation. Of course her mother remembered New Orleans as her soul’s paradise, she could hardly do otherwise, but Cassie had been surprised to discover that Laura had spent most of her childhood alone, locked in the little house on Rendon Street while her mother, Gladys Dubuisson, neé Beauvray, silent over thirty years now, spent all day and evening at the LaFollettes’, cleaning and cooking for the four boys. When Laura was eleven or twelve, she began to accompany her mother to work, and it was there, in the exquisite ancestral home of the LaFollettes in the Garden District, that Laura had met the LaFollette boys.
Behind Cassie the coffee-shop door opened and closed, and someone took a seat at the counter, leaving two seats between them. She glanced over at the man, who appeared to be in his mid-forties. He was wearing a white seersucker shirt with red stripes and a pair of yellow golfing pants, both well worn, and broken-down running shoes. He threw a driving cap on the counter; Cassie noticed the band inside, stained yellow. She guessed that when the temperature broke 110, this man ended up in a heap on the sidewalk.
“Greetings, Themis!” the man shouted jovially at the server, who gave him a slit-eyed nod. “I’ll have the usual.”
“Bode, don’t shout. My head aches me awful,” Themis said, pressing her temples with her fingertips.
“Sorry, love.”
Themis set about preparing the man’s cappuccino. Bode stood up and pulled a handful of items out of his pocket: crumpled dollar bills, spare change, business cards, lint, Starlite mints—mostly cracked—tattered Post-it notes, and square slips of paper covered with spidery handwriting and what appeared to be mathematical formulas. A nickel rolled Cassie’s way down the counter, and she caught it.
“Keep that,” Bode said, smiling. “You earned it.” His black hair was shiny and badly cut, his teeth were coffee-stained, and his smile was crooked. Cassie nodded and slipped the nickel in her pocket.
Bode patted the pocket of his shirt and pulled more bits and pieces from his pants pockets, then rummaged through the mess on the counter. “You wouldn’t happen to have a pen, would you?” he asked Cassie. “Not that I mean you owe me.”
She reached into her backpack, pulled out a pen, and slid it to him across the counter.
“Thank you, I just need to make note of this one …” He trailed off. He wrote a few sentences or figures on a Post-it, then folded it up and put it in his pocket. He hummed, drank his cappuccino, wrote more.
Gideon LaFollette,Gladys’s employer, was from an old family. A judge. Laura had written in her journal that in New Orleans at that time, there was no distinction between honesty and corruption. The worst politicians, policemen, and lawyers were sometimes the dearest fathers, the most pious Catholics. Gideon’s wife, Elise, was a former debutante and morning drinker. Their firstborn, William (whose nickname was Bank), became a relentless capitalist of unknown occupation, although Laura had been careful to note that he was cruel to his gun dogs and had never married. The second son, Jared, became a lawyer, then a judge, like his father. The third, Ori, was Laura’s favorite—the best friend of her middle and high school years, although he was older—kind and shy. He had become a pharmacist after his mother forbade him to play jazz trombone, his true love. And then there was Jackson, sometimes called Jack-Q (Cassie didn’t know why), born five years after Ori and treasured as the family baby; southerners make a cult of spoiling the lastborn. Jack gambled from the sixth grade on, twice expelled from Catholic school for shooting craps. Only his father’s influence allowed him to graduate. By the time Laura began to date him, when she was sixteen and he was a year older, he was a pool player of some notoriety, not a hustler but a shark. He lied to everyone about everything. He claimed to be older, to have a pilot’s license, to have served as an assassin in West Africa. Laura had written, He liked to pretend he had seen great suffering. Cassie knew that after Laura fled to Indiana, Jackson had gone on to become a doctor and to marry a rich, consumptive neighbor, a girl Laura described as see-through. Cassie ordered another cup of coffee and a scone. The story was more in the gaps than in the details, the rich shark cast aside for the poor hustler; Laura’s abandonment of her mother and her home. Cassie knew only one other thing: that Jackson LaFollette still lived in New Orleans, at least according to the phone book. He was sixty years old, surely prosperous, respected, and out of the game. Maybe he was out of the game.
The coffee-shop door opened another two or three times, mostly on sleepy-looking young people ordering strong coffee to go. A man joined Bode at the counter, leaving only one seat between Cassie and the conversation.
“Thomas, my brother!” Bode stood up and threw his arms around the newcomer. Thomas sat down and ordered a coffee.
Bode seemed beside himself with happiness and patted Thomas on the back.
“Bode, was I not clear about my head?” Themis asked.
“Foolish of me, sorry. Thomas, do tell.”
“No, you tell. What happened with the backer?”
Cassie looked at Thomas, then down at her notebook, then at Thomas again. She ran her thumb lightly along the edge of her coffee cup. He was a tall man whose body was shaped by work: broad-shouldered, with a thick chest and narrow waist. His hands were wide and dry, scarred. His blue jeans, thin with age and washing, were tucked into work boots nearly white with plaster dust, and she could see the muscles of his shoulders moving through his thin white T-shirt. His spine was right there, close enough that she could have touched it, a chain of crescent moons.
“Ah, well, yes, the backer,” Bode began. “There’s a small problem, a very slight problem that caused the backer to, well, back off.”
“I see,” Thomas said, stirring sugar into his coffee. His hair was sun-bleached, but there were black streaks in it: a peculiar combination of colors, and he needed a haircut.
“I said to the backer, I said as I say to the many tourists who mistake me for a homeless man, ‘I will accept your money.’ And then I showed him the machine, which is, as you know, flawless.”
“I don’t actually know that.”
“Well it is, except for this one small problem, which is that it can’t be turned on with a living subject inside it, and once it is turned on, a living subject can’t get inside it. A stumper.”
“That is a snag.”
“Other men, lesser men, would see the ignition problem as fatal.” Bode took a drink of coffee.
Cassie picked up her pencil an
d began doodling in the notebook, a rectangle, a dotted line suggesting the trajectory of a struck object.
“Let me add, since we’re being honest,” Bode continued, “that the size of the living subject doesn’t seem to have an impact on the results. Cockroaches have died, rats have died, rabbits have given up their rabbit lives. That’s as far up the food chain as I’m comfortable going, Thomas, I’ve got to say. Let go and let God, I say. And I believe I could mention something about tying a knot in the rope that would hang me.”
Thomas looked at Cassie, giving her a half-smile as he scratched the back of his neck. “I think, Bode, that you’re supposed to tie a knot in the end of your rope and hang on.”
“I’ve never known you to hold with correcting, Thomas.”
“No, I don’t. Generally.”
“But I prefer your way. Holding on to the end of the rope, as you mentioned.”
Themis emerged from the back carrying clean cups and looking worse than before, her lips in starker contrast to her pale face. “You want anything else?” she asked the three, generally.
“I’ll have another cappuccino.”
“I’ll have another black coffee as well.”
“Me, too.”
Themis took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Je-sus.”
Bode took a cigarette out of his breast pocket and tapped the filter on the counter, settling the tobacco down in the paper. “All this talk about my machine puts me in mind of the end of the world. What would you like to be doing at the end of the world, son?”
Thomas squinted at the ceiling. “You’ll have to give me some time to think about it.”
“I myself hope to be either fornicating or defecating. You heard right. There’s a lot I’d like to get out.”
Thomas turned and studied Bode hard, leaving Cassie to look at the back of his head. Bode stared straight ahead, smoking.
“I personally believe people should keep much more in,” Thomas said.
Bode nodded. “Where are you from again? Kansas?”
“Indiana.”
Cassie didn’t say anything. She could meet someone from Indiana—that long, skinny state—anywhere in the world.
“You’re probably repressed,” Bode said, blowing on his fresh cappuccino.
“Probably so.”
In Cassie’s drawing the 2-ball was only six inches dead center from a corner pocket, but the cue was behind the 5; the one thing for it was a massé shot, showy and not her strength.
Bode blew a stream of blue smoke, then stubbed out his cigarette. “I’ve met a couple people from Indiana. They were all deeply troubled but appeared to be normal. Does that describe the situation from your point of view?”
Thomas nodded.
“Another thing I noticed about you Indianaians—”
“Hoosiers.”
“Hoosiers, is that once you’re removed from your home state, you miss it something fierce. I find that curious, given the facts about Indiana.”
“What are the facts about Indiana? Thank you, Themis.”
Bode took a sip of coffee. “Flat. Ugly. Stupid. Reactionary. I could think of some more if I put my mind to it.”
“Where’d you grow up, Bode?”
“Natchez. A soporific. My heart’s desire.”
“Tell me three things you remember about growing up there. Just pictures, not feelings.”
“Three things. Sure. I … hmmmm. Let’s see. I remember running through cold sheets that had been hung on the line in the backyard. My granny’d hung them, they smelled burnt with bleach. I remember playing in a wrecked-out 1954 Nash Rambler that was abandoned in the woods behind our house. Would have been a great car if somebody had, you know. The seats got hot in the summertime. Is that two? Three: I used to pull taffy with my cousin Ruth. She was skinny and a redhead, had those thyroid eyes. She worked me over, son, past distraction.”
“There you go. It doesn’t take much, does it, to become homesick. I didn’t hear anything about Natchez in your description.”
Bode lit another cigarette. “I fear something is amiss in yer syllogism. You’re making a generalized statement about homesickness, Brother Thomas, and I’m asking why all y’all Indianaians miss that place in particular.”
Thomas drew a pattern in the sweat from his untouched water glass, a circle next to what looked like the Washington Monument, and Cassie copied it into her notebook. It was familiar.
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “It’s hard to pinpoint. Maybe I’ll write it down for you.”
“Ahh.” Bode stubbed out this cigarette. “You’ll never do it, you coward.” He stood up, stretched, sorted money from the pile of paper on the counter, and pushed Cassie’s pen back toward her.
“What am I afraid of, do you think?” Thomas asked.
Bode gathered up his Post-its, his business cards. “You’re afraid to admit what you miss most about that godforsaken place. Basketball. It’s basketball, ain’t it.”
Thomas laughed, a big laugh that earned a glare from Themis. “That’s it; you’ve figured me out.”
Bode bowed to them. “Have a good Good Friday. Remember the man who died for your sins. Thomas, don’t be a stranger.”
Cassie studied the drawing of the ball and spire, saw it cast in amber on a black base, left behind by Jimmy. For years it had been on the bookcase in the dim living room, separating Belle’s favorite novels from Laura’s, and then it had vanished.
“It’s the trylon and perisphere,” Thomas said, glancing at her notebook. “From the 1939 World’s Fair.”
“Yes.” Cassie nodded. “I remember now.” She looked up at him; he was looking back.
The night before she had dreamed she was standing in a clearing in a forest with a fat woman she should have recognized. The woman wore a cape and thick glasses and was carrying a crooked stick. Something about the woman struck Cassie as whimsical and humorous, even as she bred a dense wariness; Cassie backed away from the scene so vigorously that she bumped flat against the wall of the dream, a scrim as dense as brick. First the woman was tatting a black lace shawl but leaving holes, accidental gaps, crazed as the web of a terminally ill spider. And then the shawl was gone, and she was pointing the stick at a hawk, an old teacup, a tombstone, and saying, Me, me, me. It was a matter of time. Cassie woke up in a sweat.
“… except for the college kids, who consider it a rite of passage to vomit in the street in front of a crowd,” Thomas was saying. His truck had been a block away, sitting in direct sun. The temperature was in the mid-seventies and the humidity low, but when Thomas unlocked the passenger door, a blast of heat from inside the truck hit her like a wave. It was an old Chevy half-ton, dark blue with a black vinyl interior.
“It gets hot,” Thomas said, unlocking his door.
“What’s it like in the summer?” Cassie asked, sliding in.
“Oh, Lord. Every day here, in the summer, is a crisis. I don’t know why I stay. Some days are so humid you can close your hand around the air, like this”—he made a fist—“and gather water. This truck is rusty and riddled with salt from living on the Gulf. I probably have a pound of sand in my lungs.”
The smell of the interior was immediately recognizable: age, plaster dust, the sharp iron smell of tools, a man’s body day after day. The dashboard was gray with dirt. The truck started with a rumble, and they both rolled down their windows and opened the wings. At a stoplight Cassie said, “I think Bode was wrong about Indiana.”
Thomas glanced at her. “You’ve been there?”
“I live there, actually.”
“Is that right. Whereabouts?”
“A town called Roseville, in Hopwood County.”
Thomas shifted, looked in the rearview mirror. “Never heard of it. A nice place?”
“Some like it. Where are you from?”
“Way down in southern Indiana, near the Kentucky line.”
“What’s it close to? Corydon? Tell City? Evansville?”
“Close to Mount V
ernon. A town called Wellsboro.”
Cassie closed her eyes, picturing a map. She couldn’t see Wellsboro.
Thomas got on to Highway 10, headed north toward 90, the Gulf Coast Highway. The wind and road noise made conversation difficult. Thomas drove easily, the way Jimmy had, steering with his left hand, his right resting on the gearshift. The sunlight and caffeine worked on Cassie, making her both sleepy and jittery. She looked out the window at the passing scenery, which was flat, swampy, moss hanging from the trees. The truck hummed. If she’d made the trip with Laura, Cassie never would have met Thomas, she wouldn’t be in this truck; everything from this point forward in her life would have been different, but Cassie wouldn’t have known it, because the days would have felt the same. An oddity. Her thoughts felt like weightless things dipped in something heavier; she couldn’t precisely pull them out. She could see her mother as if in a home movie, much younger, pushing Belle on a swing set. Belle’s hair, blonder then, sailed out behind her as she flew up in the air, then gathered around her face as she approached the ground. Laura stood still, squinting into the sun and compelling the swing; her motions seemed mechanical, her mind elsewhere. Cassie tried to see herself—was she standing, was she playing?—and then she was falling, she could see her hands outstretched to break her fall.
“Whoa,” she said, sitting up.
“All right?” Thomas said, touching her arm. “You jumped.”
“I fell.” They were in a different place than when she closed her eyes, a two-lane highway running next to the Gulf, fogged in. The water was out there, on Cassie’s right, but she couldn’t quite see it, and buildings emerged from the fog then vanished again. Thomas had rolled his window most of the way up, and Cassie did the same, feeling chilled. “Where are we?”
“Between Pass Christian and Gulfport. You missed Bay St. Louis. We’re heading toward the riverboats. You gamble?”
Cassie shook her head. “Not when I’m bound to lose.”
“Good thinking.”
They passed large ugly buildings filled with cheap bathing suits and inflatable sharks; seafood restaurants; beachside motels surrounded by trees thick with Spanish moss. And there were houses, estates, behind low whitewashed brick walls, side by side with condominiums, next door to small businesses. A jumble.