by James Sallis
“So. Guess this means you’re not going to take me home, huh?”
“No,” she said, eyes meeting mine. “No, it doesn’t mean that at all, Lew. I don’t know what it means. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe meaning doesn’t have anything to do with any of this.”
She folded her napkin and laid it on the table.
“Coming with?” she said.
Oh yes.
I have been so very long at sea.
Chapter Thirteen
Before the old man finally gave up on it-before he finally gave up on just about everything-he used to haul me out hunting with him the first few times he went out each season. Something was supposed to happen out there in the woods, I guess, with just the two of us, a father and his son, men of a different size observing these ancient rituals together, but it never did. I’d already learned to shoot, with bottles heeled into a hillside out behind our house, and that was the part I was interested in. So I’d just walk alongside Dad with my old single-shot.410 cradled in the crook of an arm and carefully pointing to the ground as he’d taught me, in early years daydreaming about friends and would-be friends in the neighborhood and next weekend’s get-togethers, later about the things I’d begun discovering in books, with the twin plumes of our breath reaching out into the chill morning and reeling back, Dad every so often (it seemed always a continuous action) shouldering his.12-gauge, firing, and tucking dove, quail or squirrel into the game pocket of his scratchy canvas coat. After a couple of hours we’d stop, find a tree stump and have coffee from his thermos, wrapping hands around nesting plastic cups for warmth. On extremely cold days he brought along a hand warmer the size of a whiskey flask; you filled it with alcohol, lit the wick, slid on a cover and felt sleeve, and it smoldered there in your pocket. We’d pass it back and forth the way men pass around bottles of Jim Beam at deer camp, like athletes toasting a victory. But neither of us was an athlete. And neither of us would know many victories in his life.
I remembered all this, something I hadn’t thought of in many years, as I drove up I-55 through mile after mile of unfenced farmland stretching to the horizon, past refurbished plantations, crop duster airfields and country stores selling everything a man could need, Gas, Food, Beer: this long sigh of the forever postcolonial South. I pulled off for coffee at truckers’ roadside stops and Mini Marts where people seemed uneasy, even now, at my presence, despite (or just as easily because of) my dark suit, chambray shirt and silk tie. Attendants at gas stations watched me closely from their glassed-in pilot-houses. When I stopped for a meal at The Finer Diner near Greenville, two state policemen, bent over roast beef specials in a booth by the door, repeatedly swiveled heads my direction, conferring.
Paranoia? You better believe it. My birthright.
In the town where I grew up, there was one main street, called Cherry in my little rubber-stamp town, Main or Sumpter or Grand in a hundred others like it. At one end of this street was a cafe, Nick’s, where my father and I in stone darkness Saturday mornings heading out to hunt would order breakfast on paper plates through a “colored” window leading directly into the kitchen (the only time I recall anyone in the family ever eating out), and at the other, ten blocks distant, a bronze statue of a World War I soldier, rifle with bayonet at ready, which everyone called simply the Doughboy.
For a period of several months when I was thirteen or so, every Saturday night, like clockwork, someone managed-no simple task, with city hall and the police station right there on the circle-to paint the Doughboy’s face and hands black with shoe polish. You’d go by every Sunday morning and see one of the black trustees from the county jail up there with a bucket and rags, scrubbing it down.
Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Some said because the smartass nigger responsible had graduated from high school and, good riddance, gone up North to college. Some said because Chief Winfield and his boys had caught him in the act and done what was only right.
And my father, from whom I never before remember hearing a racial complaint, this man who called the children of white men he worked for Mistah Jim and Miz Joan, said: “Lewis, you see how it is. Here we raise his children for him, cook for him, bring up his crops, butcher his hogs-even fight his wars for him-and he still won’t acknowledge our existence.”
We were sitting on the steps of the railroad roundhouse across from Nick’s eating our breakfasts one of those lightless early mornings, maybe the last before I stopped going along. Steam rose off eggs and grits in the cold air; our paper plates were translucent with grease.
“You know those Dracula movies you watch every chance you get, Lewis? How he can never see himself in mirrors? Well, that’s you, son-that’s all of us. We trip across this earth, work and love and raise families and fight for what we think’s right, and the whole time we’re absolutely invisible. When we’re gone, there’s no record we were ever even here.”
For years I thought of that as the day my father began shrinking.
Now, years later, I remember it as one time among many that he was able momentarily to rise out of the drudge of his own life and offer an example-to give me sanction, as it were-that in my own something more might be possible.
It’s a terrible thing, that I could ever have forgotten these moments, or failed to understand them.
Oddly connected in my thoughts with all this as I Mazdaed into pure Faulknerland, Oxford, Tupelo, was a night Clare and I met, early on in our friendship, at a Maple Street pizzeria and went on to the Maple Leaf for klezmer music, impossibly joyful in its minor keys, clarinet beseeching and shrieking, stolid bass and accordion plodding on, half East Europe’s jews dying in its choruses.
Here’s what I think in higher flights of fancy. Once there existed beings, a race, a species (call it what you will) who truly belonged to this world. Then at some point, for whatever reason, they moved on, and we moved into their places. We go on trying to occupy those places, day after endless day. But we’ll always remain strangers here, all of us. And for all our efforts, whatever dissimulations we attempt, we’ll never quite fit.
Chapter Fourteen
Lights came up behind me not too far outside Greenville — for all I know, the two young men who’d been enjoying their roast beef specials at The Finer Diner.
They, the lights, winked into being far back in my mirror, pinned in the distance at first, believably neons or traffic lights, or one of those blinking roadside barriers. But then they rushed in to close the gap, like something falling out of the sky, and suddenly were there behind me, filling mirror and road.
I pulled over and watched the one in shotgun position climb out and make his careful, by-the-book way toward me. Once years ago I’d made the mistake of stepping out of my car to meet a state policeman halfway and found myself suddenly face-down on the asphalt shoulder with a knee in my back. So now I sat very still, not even reaching for my wallet, watching him come toward me in the rearview, walk out of it, reappear in the wing mirror, then at the window.
He had to be midtwenties at least but looked all of sixteen, with a close-trimmed mustache, discount-store mirror shades, black goat-ropers. Coming abreast and bending down, he removed the glasses in a quick left-to-right sweep, releasing startling green eyes.
“License and registration, sir? Proof of insurance?”
I probably imagined the slight pause and emphasis on sir.
I reached slowly into the glove compartment for the car’s papers, handed him those (in a leatherette wallet) along with my license and rental agreement. He studied them all carefully, looking from the picture on my license up to me and down again. Walked behind the car to check plates against the numbers listed.
“Would you excuse me for a moment, Mr. Griffin?”
He went back to the squad and passed documents across the sill. Waited. Exchanged a few words, straightened, came back toward me: rearview, side mirror, window.
“We apologize for holding you up, sir. You know a Lieutenant Walsh? NOPD?”<
br />
I nodded.
“He says thanks. Called headquarters here and asked us to stop you and tell you that. Said you’d be coming through in a Sears rental, gave us the plate number. Said just to tell you thanks, he wouldn’t forget it-you’d know what he meant.”
I smiled. Years ago when things were at their worst, Don was the one who stuck by me. First he, then Vicky, had made it possible for me to go on, helped me find long-lost Lew in brambles of remorse and inaction.
And Verne. How much of what I’ve become owes to Verne? I was never able to tell her what she meant to me; never really knew, until it was too late. And yet, somehow in all those years we circled and closed on one another like binary stars, all those departures and partial returns, somehow, in some indefinable manner, we had held one another up, had been able to climb together (even when apart) out of the wastes of our pasts.
How could I not have known that?
“Mr. Griffin?”
“Sorry. A sudden attack of memory.”
“Right.” He looked at me curiously. “Lieutenant Walsh also said we were to tell you to call if you need him. For anything, he said-anything at all.”
I nodded, thanked him again.
“Drive safely, Mr. Griffin.”
He tipped a brief salute against his hat brim and headed back to his squad.
An hour and spare change later I stood in my newly rented cabin at the Magnolia Branch Motel drinking the cream of a newly cracked fifth of Teacher’s from one of those squat tumblers you never see anywhere else. I’d even had to unwrap the glass, like a Christmas gift, from crinkly, twisted paper. There was a strip of paper across the toilet seat. Rubber flower appliques on the floor of the tub. The bed was equipped with Magic Fingers, but two quarters didn’t persuade them to do anything.
Missagoula, Mississippi, was like a hundred other towns scattered through the South. The interstate zipped by only a few miles away but may as well have been in China. Remnants of an old town square hosted two gas stations (one of which doubled as post office), a cafe and steakhouse, a combined town library and meeting hall, a doughnut shop, a junk store or two, and an insurance office. For two or three blocks around that hub there were a scatter of paint and hardware stores, utility companies, used-clothing or — furniture shops. Then everything opened back up to farmland, trees and sky. I’d counted four churches, so far.
The Magnolia Branch squatted at the border of town and not-town. I can’t imagine who would ever stay there, in a town like that, but rates were cheap and rooms immaculate. They still weren’t very used to having blacks drop in, I’d guess. My request for a room occasioned considerable discussion behind the wall before the clerk (and owner, as I’d later discover) returned to push across a key and take two nights in advance. I asked about the possibility of getting a drink and was told I could get beer down at the cafe but if I wanted anything else I’d have to go over to Nathan’s.
Nathan’s turned out to be the gas station that didn’t double as post office. I dropped off luggage at cabin six, walked back into town and, saying I understood liquor was for sale here, got ushered into a shed out back of the station. Bottles were set out on cheap steel shelving before which the attendant hovered impatiently. I pointed to the Teacher’s and paid him. He followed me out, locked the door carefully behind us.
So now I stood there in my Magnolia Branch Motel doorway lapping at the first few most welcome sips of scotch and looking away (Dixieland!) into dusty Delta distances. News unrolled on the TV behind me. A coup attempt somewhere in Latin America, Philadelphia man’s citizen’s award revoked when it was discovered the recipient routinely molested the adolescents his Care House harbored, Housing Authority of New Orleans under investigation by feds.
Immediately upon returning to the motel I’d phoned Clare. Her recording had come on, and I’d started telling her where I was, how she could reach me. I’d got as far as the Missagoula part when she picked up.
“I’m here, Lew. Where did you say you were?”
I spelled it for her. I may even have got it right.
“And the girl’s supposed to be there?”
“She gave it as an address at the hospital, finally, Richard said. Claimed she lived here with a relative. I’m pulling out in just a minute to try and find the place.”
“Good luck, then.”
“Thanks. I’ll call again tomorrow.”
“Lucky, lucky me!”
I finished my drink, rinsed the glass and put it face-down on a towel. I’d just pulled the door shut behind me when the phone started ringing. I unlocked the door and went back in.
“Lew,” Clare said, “remember when you said that about another man?”
“What?”
“You were talking about my cat. Joking that there was a new man in my life.”
“Oh, right.”
“Well, there is.”
“There is what?”
“A new man in my life.”
I didn’t say anything, and after a while she said, “You there, Lew?”
“I’m here.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you. I kept waiting for the right time, and it never came. Then you left, and the more I thought about it, the worse I felt. After I hung up just now, I knew I had to tell you, that I couldn’t wait anymore.”
“It’s all right, Clare.”
“It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t really care about you. I do, you know. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know I don’t want to lose you.”
We both fell silent, listening together to choruses of ghostlike voices far back in the wires, at the very edge of intelligibility.
“Oh Lew, are we going to be able to do this?”
“We’ve both been through a lot worse.”
“Indeed we have, sailor. Indeed we have.”
Silent again for a moment, we listened, but the voices, too, now were silent. Listening to us, perhaps.
“You’ll call and let me know how it’s going?”
“I will.” Though as it turned out, I didn’t.
“Bye, Lew. Love you.”
And she was gone.
Chapter Fifteen
I stopped at Nathan’s to ask directions and, following a consultation between the surly black man chewing on cold pizza behind the counter and a mechanic with grease worked into the lines of his face so profoundly that it looked like some primitive mask, headed out of town away from the interstate, leaving pavement behind after a few miles, tires clawing for safe ground among gullylike ruts, the little Mazda sashaying and hip-heavy.
Houses were infrequent and set back off the road, simple wood structures built a foot or two off the ground, most of them long unpainted and patched with odd scraps of lumber, corrugated tin, tar paper, heavy cardboard. Many had cluttered front porches and neatly laid-out vegetable gardens alongside. Small stands of trees surrounded house and yard; beyond that, flat farmland unrolled to every side.
I pulled in, as I’d been told back at Nathan’s, by a yellowish house on the right, first one I came to after crossing railroad tracks and going through two crossroads. An old woman in a faded sundress scattered grain for chickens at the side of the house. She was oddly colorless, pulpy like wood long left outdoors, collapsing into herself with the years. She looked at me with all the interest a tree stump might display.
“Hello, m’am. Sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for Alouette.”
Nothing showed on her face. “Not bothering me,” she said. Then she turned and walked away, to a rough shed nailed onto the back of the house at one end, open at the other. I followed a few steps behind. She dumped grain back into a burlap bag and folded the top over. Hung the pail from a nail just above.
“Could you tell me if she’s around?”
“Have to ask what your business with her might be.”
“I promised a friend I’d look her up.”
She grunted. It was more like the creak of a gate than any grunt I’d ever heard. “Name’s Adams. Wh
ere you from, boy?”
“New Orleans.”
“Mmm. Thought so.” She looked to see how the chickens were doing. They seemed more interested in pecking one another than the food. “I was up to Memphis once. You been there?”
“Yes m’am, I have.” Memphis was where my father died, though I wasn’t there then.
“You care much for it?”
“Not particularly. It’s like just about any other town you see around here, only a lot bigger.”
She groaned-it couldn’t have been a laugh-and said that was God’s truth. Then she looked at me for a while before saying: “Well then, I guess I know who you must be. That Griffin fellow LaVerne took up with. Don’t much like you, from what I know. Don’t expect me to.”
“You knew LaVerne, then?”
Again that long, affectless regard.
“Mother gen’rally knows her only daughter.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Adams,” I said shortly. “I didn’t know. I had no idea Verne’s parents were still alive.”
“Just the one. But neither did she, boy, that you’d notice. Not that her daddy and I ever wanted things any different, you understand. Vernie had her life down there in New Orleans, and she was welcome to it, but we didn’t want any part of it. Wrote once or twice.”
“LaVerne really turned things around, later on. She helped a lot of other people get their lives together, too. You both could have put all that behind you.”
“Maybe we could have. Maybe not.” She eyed the chickens again, looked up at the sky. Darkness had begun working its way in at day’s edge. “Things had changed here too.”
“So Alouette came here because you’re her grandmother?”
“You have the kind of troubles that girl had, you just naturally go to a woman. From what I know about down there where you-all are, there wasn’t much of anybody she could go to.”
“Her mother was trying to get in touch with her, before she died. That’s why I’m here now.”