Lisse cupped her hands around her bottle, frowning, staring at the label. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Oh, come on,” he said lightly. “The way he was hitting on you? The guy ought to be ashamed of himself.”
A hesitation; a debate.
“He wasn’t,” she said at last. “He was asking about you.”
* * * *
John heard approaching music and shifted his chair until he was beside her, the better to hear her.
On the street a moment later, a walkin’ band headed down toward the river, taking its time, no marching. Black men in fresh white suits, just horns and clarinets, with a tall white man in back, base drum with no lettering strapped to his chest. Several women, mostly black, in fancy white dresses glittering with rhinestones, winding in and out of the band, strolling to the beat, snapping their fingers, grinning at the pedestrians who began to tag along.
John recognized the tune but didn’t know the name. He was pretty sure it was Glenn Miller. Maybe “Tuxedo Junction.” Maybe “String of Pearls.” It didn’t really matter. It just didn’t seem right for this place, this time.
“He wanted to meet you,” Lisse said quietly, forcing him to lean closer, smelling the beer and the perfume and the lingering spice of their meal. “That was before, when he was sitting down.”
“You should have sent him over.”
“I told him, just go on over. He’s a nice guy, I said, you can just go over. He won’t bite your head off.
“He didn’t want to. Said he was shy. Said he wanted to meet you. I didn’t push it. I had work to do, and besides, he gave me the shivers. I didn’t like those eyes. It’s like you can see right through them, you know? So he tries again, and I ignore him, pretend like I don’t hear him.
“Then he’s up there paying his bill, and he says he wants to talk to you. I tell him, it ain’t my job to go around introducing folks to each other. Not my job. You want to talk to him, you go right ahead. No skin off my nose.
“He says, that ain’t right, not the way he does things. He needs an introduction. He tells me I have to do it. I say, didn’t your momma teach you any manners? I don’t have to do anything, especially not for someone I don’t know.
“He gets mad, you know? He looks at me, gives me a look that really gets me going. Like, I’m a somebody and you’re nothing but a waitress, you mind your place, young lady, and you do what you’re told. He calls me young lady, but I know that tone. I’ve heard it all my life. It doesn’t say young lady, it says child. Go on, child, obey your elders, that’s a good girl.
“So I told him flat out, I said, I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to, y’hear? Besides, I already told you, it’s not my place. You want to meet him so bad, you got two good legs, use them and do it yourself.
“He gets this look, then, like he smells something bad, and he tells me I’m making a mistake.
“I say, look, it comes down to it, I don’t have a choice, okay? It ain’t my job to bother the customers. I ain’t going to get fired just for you.
“That’s when you come up, when he tells me we all have options, or some such nonsense like that. Man about drove me crazy, acting like that. Just about drove me crazy.”
* * * *
The walkin’ band was gone.
The music faded.
John tapped a finger on the table, thinking, wondering who the hell that guy was. He had never seen him before in his life. Unless he was a lawyer for one of the convicts he’d been talking to. But he’d met most of them, little more than simple intermediaries to get him into each prison.
He sniffed, rubbed a finger under his nose. “I wonder how he knew I was writing a book.”
Lisse shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
Until she answered, he hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. He checked the street again, then felt a grin playing with his lips. He looked at her and said, “So Lisse, you up for an adventure?”
“What?”
He stood quickly, signaling the waiter as he drained the rest of his bottle. “Come on/’
“Where?”
“Where else? The guy wants to meet me, he’s following us around, let’s go find out what he wants.”
She shook her head quickly. “I don’t think so.”
He put a hand on her shoulder and let the grin out. “Oh, come on, why not?’’ He pulled lightly, and reluctantly she got to her feet, waiting stiffly while he paid the bill, drawing back when he took her elbow and led her to the sidewalk. “Okay, which way?”
To the left the street was mostly residential. Apartments, he assumed, with garages on the first floor he figured must have been stables in the old days, however long ago they had been. Jackson Square was to the right, two blocks down. Not crowded, but enough people to prevent him from seeing very far. It shouldn’t be all that difficult to find a chubby old man in a white suit and Panama hat.
But at Bourbon Street she balked.
“What?” he said, trying to see over the heads of the pedestrians wandering in the street. The walkin’ band had finished, and most were against the fence that walled in the central garden. White suits and dresses all over the place.
“I can’t do this, John. Please, let’s go somewhere else.”
Smiling, he grabbed her shoulders. “Listen, Lisse, for the past couple of years I’ve been all over the damn country, talking to people, most of whom have been executed by now. That may sound interesting or exciting to you, but believe me, it’s not. This,” and he swept one hand out, “is something else. This is an adventure.”
She didn’t smile back. She moved her shoulders slightly, just enough to free them, and shook her head. “I can’t. I got a bad feeling. I can’t.”
He pleaded with her with a look, but she only shook her head again and hurried away without looking back.
“Lisse!” he called.
Nothing.
A step to follow her, a step toward the sidewalk, and he cursed the choice she had forced him to make. A slow turn; nothing. When he looked back toward Canal, she was gone, and so were most of the tourists.
“Damn,” he muttered, knowing that even if he caught up with her, there’d be nothing for him with her tonight. The old man had spooked her, and he, with his usual ham-hands, had completed the process.
He walked for over an hour, checking around the Square, walking along the levee, finally deciding there was no sense trying to find him in any of the bars in the Quarter. The old guy, for some reason, didn’t seem the type. It wasn’t until he was on his way back to the hotel that it hit him:
Maybe he was a lawyer for Patty.
That almost goaded him into a trot, until he reminded himself that she already had a lawyer, back up in Illinois. And he wasn’t old, and he wasn’t fat, and he claimed, like everyone else, that he didn’t know where Patty was.
Or even if she still had the boy.
His son.
He had also suggested, in tones not at all bothering to coat the condescension, that John give up on the book and get his butt back behind his desk and make a few bucks for a change. There was no guarantee, but that might bring his family back together again.
John stopped at the foot of Canal, looked up, looked at the river, and said, “The hell with it.”
He crossed over, moving slowly, feeling the evening’s heat on his shoulders, the sweat that chilled his chest and spine. When he entered the hotel, he had decided it was time to move on. One more stop, in Texas, and he would be done.
He would go home.
He would call George and let him know all the talking was done, it was time to get to work.
He had one hand on the banister before he realized he was alone.
The lobby, dimly lit, was empty.
No one in the café, no muffled music from the lounge, no one behind the front desk. No voices from the mezzanine.
He took a step up, and the telephones rang.
The phone at the café, two on side tables, the one at
the desk. Not in unison; each one different, each at its own pace. The result was less cacophony than carillon.
They rang softly.
Puzzled, he waited a few seconds, thinking one of the clerks would soon pop out of the office, or the hotel operator would pick up, or someone would hurry out of the lounge, or the kitchen.
They rang softly.
He shrugged when no one appeared, took another step up, and stopped, turned, listening to the ringing.
Another adventure, he thought; pick up the phone and see who’s there.
Without bothering to tell himself he was being an idiot, he hurried over to the desk, leaned over, saw no bodies on the floor, called out once in hopes a clerk would hear him, then shrugged and picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
All the phones stopped ringing.
No one answered, but someone was there.
“This is the Royal Cajun hotel, there’s no one here to answer. You want me to take a message?”
Someone was there.
“Hello?”
“Well, hello there, Ace. You having fun yet?”
It was Patty.
He yanked the receiver away from his ear, gaped at it, and returned it to his ear.
“Give it up, Ace. Give it up, it’s too late.”
And the phone went dead.
* * * *
6
1
H
e knew he was sitting down, and he knew he was floating.
An old sensation, a comfortable one.
He widened his eyes as far as they would go, narrowed them into a squint, and focused on the glass between his hands. There were colors in there not in any rainbow, and he tried like hell to put a name to them, until they blurred and he had to look away because they made his eyes water.
Floating.
Slowly he moved his head, looking around, trying to make sense of the shapes and the lights. Listening to a honky-tonk piano in the corner, soft and sad.
Floating.
He didn’t bother to check his watch; he knew he wouldn’t be able to read it.
Hours, maybe, since he had spoken with Patty.
No; since Patty had spoken with him.
Hours, days, who cares, it was all right despite the scare because he was floating now, away from it all, and wouldn’t have to think about it until he was ready. He wouldn’t have to wonder how she had known where he was, wouldn’t have to wonder where she was now, wouldn’t have to wonder why the Patty who had called on all those phones was so different from the ghost Patty who followed him from state to state, hotel room to hotel room, keeping him sane.
Floating.
God, he loved floating.
Everything made sense up here. The Truth Of It All drifted past him like puffed lazy clouds on a soft summer day. He recognized it. He memorized it. He watched kaleidoscope rays from the fat prism sun illuminate it all and show him the Way.
It made him laugh at its simplicity.
It made him angry because he could never remember it once the floating was over. Only hints and glimpses of what he had learned, like hints and glimpses of a dream that came and went just before waking.
It made him grin when fingers touched his shoulder and slid away.
“John?”
Voices, too. Once in a while there were voices, celestial, singing words he couldn’t always understand but it didn’t matter because they were so beautiful.
So indescribably beautiful.
Like the music, that piano, playing somewhere in the clouds. Not chamber, not classical, but a soft insistent honky-tonk sound, a blues sound, a fitting sound that required no words because there were no words for a sound like that, for the simple chords and the simple beat and the way they fit into the kaleidoscope like glittering pieces of small bleeding jewels.
Beautiful enough to make him want to cry.
Beautiful enough to make him want to scream.
Something cool closed around his wrist.
He stared at it for a long while before he recognized it as a hand, long fingers and no rings. Carefully, because it wasn’t easy to stay afloat if you made sudden moves, he tracked the hand to a wrist to a flowing white sleeve to a narrow round shoulder to a cloud of intense auburn that sent wisps of itself, across the face of an angel.
She spoke.
He couldn’t hear her.
She spoke again, and he wanted to weep.
An arm around his waist.
The angel would guide him, he knew that, and he let her.
Floating.
Music fading.
Floating.
From wherever he was to a new place now, forced to use his useless legs, swimming through the air that was at once warm and cool.
She spoke to him. Gently. Sadly. The arm still so strong at his waist that he leaned into her and felt how soft and hard she was. A true angel. An angel who would sift through the kaleidoscope and show him the sense of it, the patterns of it, the melody and words of it.
He licked his lips and tried to answer when he heard her ask a question, but his tongue wouldn’t work and his throat wouldn’t work and all he could do was grin while a single tear made its way down his cheek.
Floating.
Using his legs to propel him. Concentrating so fiercely he felt an ache in his chest and a tiny stab behind his eyes.
But he wouldn’t let her down, this guardian guiding angel. He couldn’t. It would be wrong. It would be as wrong as what he had done to Patty and his son. His fault. It had to have been his fault, or they wouldn’t have been gone that morning in May, a note on the kitchen table beneath his favorite coffee mug. His fault, or Joey would have called him before now and told him that he loved him.
The bizarre thing was, the thing he couldn’t understand despite the Truth floating with him, was why she had left. Why she had taken the boy. One year, maybe less, that’s all, he had told her. They had plenty of money, and she was still working, but as soon as he had showed her the proposal Trout had prepared, she had freaked, had declared that she didn’t know him anymore, that he wasn’t the man she had married, that this wasn’t negotiable.
He wouldn’t do it, and that was that.
She wouldn’t allow it.
His fault.
All his fault, because he had yelled for the first time in their marriage, losing it completely, demanding to know what was so wrong if money wasn’t the issue.
His fault, because Joey started crying.
His fault, because he had done it anyway.
Sinking. Slowly sinking.
The angel sang then, and he tightened his neck and he tightened his jaw and he heard her sing, “Hang on, hang on, it won’t be but a minute.”
Floating again, upward now and slowly, smelling the scent of the angel and wondering if that was blasphemy, if angels were supposed to let others know how they smelled, how they felt, how amazingly powerful they were to keep men like him floating for what seemed like forever.
And drifting, his legs back in use, his eyes without focus, dim light and bright light, and the angel singing constantly, like a lullaby, like a hymn that made him want to sing along, but all he could say was, “Angel. Angel.”
While the angel sang, “That’s right, John, that’s right, just a few more steps, that’s right, that’s right.”
A moment’s new drifting, almost sinking, that frightened him because her protective arm left him, and he flailed until she sang again and took him again and guided him into a darkness, floating while she sang, and falling while she held him, and staring up at absolutely nothing while her hands fluttered over him and a miracle happened.
What once was weight was now weightless.
What once was wrong was now perfectly all right.
And when she sang in his ear, “Sleep now, get some sleep,” he grinned and sang back, “I think angels are God.”
* * * *
2
It didn’t take very long.
One minute he w
as saying something weird about God, the next he was sound asleep, or passed out; it didn’t make much difference to her as long as he was all right.
She fussed for a few minutes. Turning on the bathroom light in case he needed it. Draping the coverlet over him because the room was too cold. Dropping his clothes onto the chair by the table without, she hoped, wrinkling them too much. Adjusting the drapes to keep as much light out as she could. Picking up her purse where she’d dropped it when she came in and putting it on the table where, she saw, he had a tape recorder and one of those portable computers.
In the Mood - [Millennium Quartet 02] Page 5