by James Sallis
A squat obelisk of veined marble bearing the figure of a child, though he wore an officer’s uniform: Let Us Remember That After Midnight Cometh Morn.
A casket-shaped headstone with a central spire of wrought iron: Honor. Family. Faith.
And on a small, simple marker hand-carved to resemble a scroll, far more appropriate to New Orleans (where it would have indicated the young man died in a duel, not war): Mort sur le champ d’honneur.
Poor ol’ Tom Jefferson with his slave mistress Sally Hemings and his two hundred slaves at Monticello and his denouncements of slavery as a great political and moral evil, knowing all the time he would suffer economic ruin if his own slaves were freed. And that the neighbors would talk something awful.
Life, Mr. Jefferson, is an unqualified, neo-Marxist bitch.
Everything comes down to simple economics, however fine-spirited we are.
Looking up, I saw that a white boy of twelve or so stood off at the side of the field with a shotgun cradled in his arms, watching me.
I nodded his way.
He nodded back and kept watching.
As Robert Johnson said: Sun goin’ down, boy, dark gon’ catch me here.
Maybe not a good idea, even this late in the American game. So I mounted my Mazda and rode into the sunset, leaving the dead, those dead, forever behind.
Chapter Twenty-One
Baby girl McTell died on November 19th, on a starless, overcast morning, a little after 2:00 A.M.
The phone in my motel room dredged me from sleep. Topmost levels of my mind came instantly awake; I waited as others drifted up to join them. Lights from a car in the lot outside made a shadow screen of my wall, everything outsize and tipped at odd angles as in old German Expressionist films. The car’s idle was set too low; every few seconds it began sputtering out and the driver had to tap the gas pedal.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Mr. Griffin?”
I said yes, and Doctor Arellano told me they had done all they could.
I thanked him, said I’d be in later to see to arrangements, and hung up. There was nothing to drink, or I would have drunk it. Outside, a car door slammed and a woman shouted, as the car pulled away, Damn you! You hear me? God damn you!
I splashed water on my face and sat for a while staring out into the darkness with late-night radio blathering behind me. Then I turned on water in the shower to give it time to warm while I shaved. I was climbing in when the phone rang again.
“Lew? Teresa. Becky Walden just called. The nurse who was taking care of our girl tonight. She knew I’d want to know. I’m so sorry, Lew.”
I watched dampness spread slowly over the carpet at my feet.
“Lew, are you okay?”
“Fine.” Clearing my throat, I said it again.
“Listen, it’s my night off. Would you like me to come over? Maybe it’s not a good idea for you to be alone tonight. I’m up anyway-I can’t ever sleep like a normal person, even on my nights off-and watching old movies. I could be right there, provided you don’t mind stay-at-home old clothes and aboriginal hair. There’s no sense in your going in to the hospital till morning, anyway. None of the administrators are there before nine.”
“I’d like you here,” I said after a moment.
“Then I’m on my way.”
Her stay-at-home old clothes turned out to be designer, French and recently pressed. The aboriginal hair looked pretty much the way it always did.
Myself, I’d barely managed a dash through the shower, jeans and a T-shirt.
“Lew,” she said when I opened the door, “I’d like you to meet Beth Ann, the only reason I’m still here in the States. I hope you don’t mind my bringing her along.”
Her companion was a stunning, tall woman with light brown skin, golden eyes and elaborate Old South manners. She took my hand and seemed for a moment on the verge of curtsying.
“Beth Ann’s from Charleston. She’s never been able to quite get over it.”
“Now that I’ve seen her, I’d be surprised if Charleston ever got over her.”
“What did I tell you?” Teresa said to Beth Ann.
“You told me he was a good-looking charmer. And you were at least half right.”
“Does the word coquettish come to mind?” Teresa asked me.
“Among others,” I said. Mutual admiration was flowing thick in there. Pretty soon we’d have to hack our way through it with machetes.
“I’m sorry about the little girl, Mr. Griffin.”
“Lew. And thank you. Though I guess it’s what we all had to expect.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier.”
“No. No, it doesn’t.”
Teresa lowered a paper bag onto the dresser and reached in, pulling out three mugs, each fitted with its own lid. She handed one to each of us, kept one herself. Mine was so hot I could hardly hold on to it.
“Mistake,” Teresa said. “Trade. This is coffee: yours. B.A. and I have tea.”
“Tea’s wonderful. Split it with me?”
“Of course. But I didn’t know you were a tea drinker. You’ve always had coffee.”
“When in Rome,” I said.
“Quite.”
I had never told her about Vicky. Now I did.
“You loved her,” Teresa said when I finished.
“Oh yes.”
“And you let her go.”
“The way one lets the wind blow, or the sun come up. She made her own choices, her own decisions. There wasn’t much I could do.”
“There are always things we can do, Lew. You could have gone back with her. She asked.”
I shook my head, much as I had done all those years ago. I handed Teresa the mug. She drank and passed it back.
“Do you hear from her?”
“I did, for a while. Less and less as time went on. She had a family, a son, a busy husband doing important things, a new daughter. And her own career, of course. Ties loosen. Memories get hung on walls or put away in the corners of drawers and life goes on.”
Teresa held out the almost-empty mug and, when I shook my head, drank off the last swig of tea herself. Then she pried the lid off the coffee, sipped, passed it on to me. We were all sitting on a long plastic-covered couch under the picture window with its theater-curtain drape, looking at cinderblock painted green and light from the bathroom spilling out over brown carpeting.
“You miss her,” Teresa said.
“I miss a lot of things-”
“She wasn’t a thing, Lew.”
“-but the train keeps moving on.”
“When I was ten,” Beth Ann said, “my sister, the one who raised me after my folks died, put me on a train to Chicago, to see my grandparents. I’d never been out of Charleston, never been much of anywhere but home and the Catholic school I attended. I was scared to death. I didn’t even know there were bathrooms on the train. And I was starved. I’d left home at six in the morning without breakfast and everybody around me now was eating chicken or sandwiches out of bags and boxes. I hadn’t moved this whole time. I was just sitting there, half a step from peeing my pants, when a conductor walked up. I’ll never forget him. A white man, in his thirties I guess, though he seemed horribly old at the time. And he just said: Come with me, girl. Took me back to the club car, showed me where the bathroom was, the one he and the other employees used. And the rest of that trip he kept bringing me ham sandwiches. Just a slice of ham, two pieces of white bread and mayonnaise, but they tasted better than anything else I’d ever had in my life.”
We’d long ago finished the coffee, but had kept passing the mug back and forth in one of those spontaneous, unspoken inspirations that occasionally arise. Whoever held the mug (we now realized, all at once) had to speak.
Teresa: “Many women have loved you, Lew.”
Beth Ann: “Life could be worthwhile without Terri, I know that. There would be reasons to go on living. I would find them. But right now I can’t imagine what they might be.”
Ter
esa: “Coming here, to the States to live-for a single year, I thought then-I felt as Columbus must have felt. I was falling off the edge of the world, leaving civilization behind me. Then I discovered malls! fast food! credit cards!”
Me: “Once in the sixties I remember seeing spray-painted on the wall of a K amp;B: Convenience Kills.”
Teresa: “ ‘For arrogance and hatred are the wares peddled in the thoroughfares.’ ”
B.A.: “Yeats.”
Me: “ ‘A Poem for My Daughter.’ Now I’m the fifty-year-old, unsmiling, unpublic man.”
“I think we need to give some thought to food,” Teresa said. “Food seems essential.”
“I think we’re all still waiting for that conductor,” Beth Ann said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The sun was edging up by the time we climbed into Teresa’s car to head for a restaurant out on the loop. I sat between her and Beth Ann in the front seat. Morning light filled our conversation, too; shadows fell away. When they dropped me back at the motel an hour or so later, after two pecan waffles and a gallon of coffee, I’d begun filling slowly with light myself.
I showered, put on real clothes (Verne called them “grown-up clothes,” I suddenly remembered) and went to the hospital to see what I needed to do. Day Administrator Katherine Farrell, a woman in her late fifties and more handsome than pretty, striking nonetheless, expressed her condolences and said that Mrs. Adams had already signed the necessary papers.
I found her sitting in the covered bus stop outside the hospital. I sat down beside her. We watched traffic go by.
“Ain’t the first or the last time either of us lost something,” she said after a while.
“No, m’am.”
A workhorse of an old Ford pickup, fenders ripped away, heaved past, wearing the latest of several coats of primer. A beetle-green new Toyota followed close behind. Rap’s heavy iambs, its booming bass, washed over us.
“I want you to know I’ve been talking to those nurses in there. They tell me you loved that little girl, that you’re a good man. And judging from what you said on the way here, my daughter turned out a fair good woman.”
“Yes, m’am. She did. She always was.”
“Been wrong before.”
“Yes, m’am.” Then, after a moment, nothing more forthcoming: “Thank you.”
I stood. “My car’s in the lot, Mrs. Adams. I’ll drive you back home now, if you’re ready.”
She put her hand out and I took it. It was like holding on to dry twigs.
“I’d appreciate that, Lewis,” she said.
I was back in Clarksville by midafternoon and, after a quick meal at a place called The Drop, stretched out at the motel for a few hours’ sleep. I’d got almost half of one of those hours when the phone rang.
I struggled to the surface and said, “Yeah?”
“Sorry about the kid. I know how that feels, and that nothing I can say’s going to help. You know who this is, right?”
I nodded, then came a little more awake and said, “Camaro.” The world was swimming into focus, albeit soft.
“You okay, man?”
“Fine. Just haven’t managed much sleep this last couple of days.”
“Know how that is, too. I can call back.”
“No reason to. What’s up?”
“Well …” It rolled on out for half a minute or so. “Probably shouldn’t be calling you at all. Last time I did, from what I hear, you went apeshit and ralphed those boys right into the hospital. You ever hear of asking a guy first?”
“I asked.”
“Oh yeah? Remember to say please?”
“I’m sure I did. Rarely forget that. I may have left off the thank you, though, now that I think about it.”
“Ever had your jaw wired, Griffin?”
“Came close a few times.”
“I bet you did. Probably chew the wires up and spit them at people. Well, what the fuck, those boys are pretty much garbage anyway. You don’t take them out to the curb, someone else will.”
“So: you called up to give me a few hot tips on navigating the complex social waters of postcolonial Mississippi. Or just to chat, for old times’ sake? Not that we share any old times.”
“We all know you’re bad by now, Griffin.”
“Yeah, well, I need sleep more than I need bullshit right now.”
“You also need help finding your girl. Though damn if I know why anyone’d want to help you.”
“It’s my honest face. My purity of heart. My high position in antebellum society. And the twenties I spread around. What do you have?”
“Thought you always remembered to say please.”
“Please.”
“There’s a girl, Louette, that’s been kind of living at this dealer’s house just over the state line. I mean, they finally took a look around and realized she’s been there at least a month. Helping out at first you know, doing the guys when they were able or whatever, but since then just hunkering down there, riding a big free one. Even they know that’s not good business.”
“Thank you.”
I wrote down the address he gave me.
“One thing,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Try to keep from going nuclear on this one? You’re not in the big city now. We try to keep a lower profile out here, not draw too much attention to ourselves.”
I told him I’d do what I could. Neither of us believed it.
The house was up in West Memphis, on the outskirts, in a part of town owing its existence to the spillover from Memphis military bases during World War II, a warren of apartment-size simple wood homes set close in row after row like carrots in a garden. Narrow, bobtail driveways had eroded through the years, cowlicks of grass and hedge pushing through them; many of the carports had become extra rooms, utility sheds, screened-in porches; trailers were grafted onto some. Abandoned refrigerators, motorcycles and decaying cars sat in yards beside swing sets and inflatable pools.
I pulled to the curb at 3216 Zachary Taylor. Out my side window in the distance I could see the wing-like curve of the Arkansas-Mississippi Bridge. I’d had to drive on into Memphis, drop onto Riverfront Drive, and loop back across the bridge into Arkansas. I started up the brief walk, hearing what sounded like reggae country music from inside. Marley in Nashville, maybe. Jimmy Cliff and His Country Shitkickers.
Remembering Camaro’s admonitions, I knocked politely at the door. No one responded, so I knocked, politely, again. Then, with still no response, as politely as possible I started kicking.
The door opened and a man maybe half my age stood there. Brush-style blond hair, fatigue pants with a white Hanes T, lizard cowboy boots. Pumper muscles and an earring. Tumbler in hand. Tequila, from the smell of it.
“What is your problem?”
Behind him, from different rooms, both Randy Travis and reggae were playing at high volume, crashing onto one another’s beach, from time to time blending in an oddly beautiful way.
“Oh. Sorry. Didn’t think you’d heard me.”
“We heard you. They heard you over in Little Rock, man.”
“Good. It’s so hard to be heard in this world. Thank you.”
“Mama brought you up right, did she? Manners like that, I’d think you couldn’t be anything but one of those biblebeaters that come through here every week or so. They’re always wearing a coat and tie, too. Don’t nobody else ‘round here.”
He took a sip of his drink.
“But of course you ain’t no biblebeater, are you?”
“No sir, I have to tell you I’m not. But I do wonder if you might do me the favor of answering a question or two. I won’t trouble you to take much of your time.”
“And why would I answer any questions you’d have? Unless you have a warrant, that is.”
“Warrant?”
“Come on, you got cop on you like slime on a snail.”
Another, shorter man with a close-cut helmet of hair, vaguely elfish, had joined him at th
e door. Squinting beneath monumental eyebrows he said, “Yeah, man, this the new South. Nigger cops ever’where.”
“You go on back inside now, Bobo. We’re doing just fine out here.”
“So that’s the way it is here in America. What made us great,” he said to me. “You come back with a warrant, or the next time it’s clear trespass. You hear what I’m saying?”
Uh-oh. This guy watched cop shows; I was in trouble.
He shut the door.
When it stopped against my foot, he glanced down.
Then he looked back up at me and, for a split second before he caught himself, over my shoulder.
It was enough.
I went down, rolling, as the guy behind me swung and, meeting no resistance, connected with Mr. Warrant midchest, a glancing blow, then toppled himself.
I pivoted back like a break dancer and slammed my feet into Warrant’s kidneys. His glass bounced off the front wall and rebounded, spinning, into the small entryway, came up against vinyl coping and stopped there, rocking back and forth. I hooked fingers into his neck now that he was down. Put a heel hard against the other one’s balls and felt him curl in on himself.
“Your call,” I told him. “Funny how so much of life comes down to attitude, huh?”
“Hold on, man,” he said. “We can talk about this.” And the minute I started backing off his windpipe and carotid: “Bobby Ray!”
Who trotted in from a room to the right where the face of some talk-show host filled a TV screen like an egg in a bottle, nailing live audience and viewers with sincere clear eyes.
Bobby Ray had a sincere Walther PPK in one hand.
I had a coat rack.
It caught him full across neck and chest. Remember Martin Balsam pedaling backward down the stairs in Psycho?
His head came up off the floor like a turtle’s, trying for air. Didn’t get it. The head went back down. He was still.
I set the coat rack back down in the corner. A few well-anchored coats swung to a stop on its hooks; most were on the floor.
“You have a right not to move,” I told Mr. Warrant. “You get up and I use you to clean furniture. You hear what I’m saying?”