Blood Makes Noise

by Gregory Widen

  Gina rushed to him. “Michael…”

  He couldn’t even speak through pain-clenched teeth. She lifted his shoulders and cradled his head. “You can’t drive. Not the way you’re hurt.”

  “I just need to get in the truck.”

  “You’ve reopened the wound. You’ll never be able to shift like this.”

  “I have…I just have to…”

  “Go home, Michael. Go back to your life. What could possibly be worth this?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I might.”

  Clouds crept up from France and tore themselves on granite sores.

  “I know hell is only half-full. But maybe, just maybe, if I finish one thing, keep one promise to one woman in my life, even a dead one…hell will forget my name…”

  “Do you really believe a person can fool hell?”

  “I have to.”

  Gina looked out over the ridge and its few scattered German pillboxes, long abandoned and stained with lichen.

  “I can drive you further. Get you into France…or Spain.”

  He turned, and her face was pale as a candle. “Gina. I have nothing left but this. Do you understand? Nothing. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. But it matters to me what happens to you.”

  Gina stood and reached for the driver’s door.

  “Maybe that’s reason enough.”

  Somewhere they crossed into France.

  The road fell off grassy flats, switchbacked down, and pierced a tiny hamlet shuttered tight against mountain ghosts. There were no street lamps or cars, and it passed and was gone.

  “What about your family?” He had his head against the seat, window open though the air was cold, because the truck stank of blood and fire and two days of confusion.

  “I gave them up.”

  “Husband?”

  “Him too. Did you marry?”

  “Once. Why did you try to kill yourself?”

  “I’d given everything else up. It just seemed…natural. Turns out I wasn’t very good at it. Where’s your wife?”

  “Dead. A thousand years now.”

  She was driving well, shifting better than he, and the Bedford appreciated it.

  “Everyone you know dies, Michael.”

  A half hour later they reached the edge of Isola, a cluster of bluish street lamps set among tiled roofs. Dogs howled, a single car made the corner and passed indifferently with amber headlights. French headlights. They turned at the small town-center, crossed a bouldered river into the woods on the other side, shut down the Bedford, and the sound was fast-moving water over smashed rock.

  “It’ll be morning soon. We probably shouldn’t drive by day.”

  “Will the gendarmes be looking for you?”

  “Only takes one angry Italian police call. They must know I’m going west. They know everything else about me.”

  She did what she could for his ankle and redressed the bandage.

  “Those people at my house. You knew them.”

  “Two of them.”

  “Are they friends?”

  “I worked with them once”—he looked through the trees, across the river and into Isola—“and I don’t think they’re friends anymore.”

  Michael opened the door. “We better not risk a hotel. You can sleep in the cab. I’ll lie in back.” But he was on amphetamines, and she could hear him as she rested her head on the seat, walking circles in the gravel…

  She found him at noon, curled asleep among leaves. She left him there and crossed the bridge into town, where they accepted her lira, selling her brioche, ham, and coffee.

  When she returned Michael was up, sitting in the open passenger door reading a Michelin map. He waved off the food but took the coffee, and Gina could see it burn its way down his throat.

  “There’s another dirt track.” The map was spread over his knees. “I think it could get us out of the mountains.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “We’ll have to take the main road to Saint-Étienne to pick it up.”

  “All right.”

  Gina turned to the stretched tarp over the truck’s bed. “Is she really in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s been dead a long time.”

  “She hasn’t begun being dead.”

  After nightfall they drove the road to Saint-Étienne, picking up the gravel track that wound through crumbling ghost towns going to ruin in the mountain wind. The Alps released them at Barcelonnette and they passed attractive villages. Nobody looked at them. Nobody turned on a flashing blue light. They skirted a man-made lake with shores of concrete dust.

  “I smell gasoline.”

  Michael did too. The engine was hesitating. “I think something’s wrong with the truck.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Not if it needs anything more than a quart of oil.”

  The ground lost its mountain gray and sprouted irrigated fields of apples, peaches, cows. One-blink towns crowded neck to neck on the road.

  Outside of Sisteron, at the joining of two valleys, the Bedford went into steep motorized senility, forgetting how to shift, how to combust gasoline, forgetting which way was left and which right. “It’s dying,” Gina said.

  He decided on the next repair stop and parked at a small garage, till dawn brought the owner, older and thickset in dirty blue coveralls and crushed beret. He listened patiently to Michael describing the truck’s death rattles, then told him this wasn’t a repair garage but part of the local farm, which he worked for. The next service garage was ten or fifteen kilometers.

  “English?” he asked.

  “Irish,” Michael lied.

  “Ah. Then we both hate the English.” With that bond he insisted on looking under the hood. Gina took up a position beside him as assistant, and he liked the attention. Michael felt his mind drifting and sat on a stone curb. The sun burned here but the air held its cold. The old mechanic was grumbling localisms about the engine’s condition when he pulled out of its gullet the crushed remains of a bullet.

  “You know. Kids,” Gina said.

  A few minutes more and he came up with additional lead remains and clumps of burned hay.

  “Were you in the Resistance?” he called out jovially to Michael.

  “Wasn’t everyone?”

  The mechanic laughed. It was an old and—at the time Michael was in college here—touchy joke about how this most accommodating of countries to its conquerors produced, during the war, a resistance movement a thousand times larger in memory than it ever was in real life. It was shameful history and so now didn’t exist. Everyone, you know, had been part of the Resistance.

  The mechanic stuck his head back under the hood. Gina walked over to Michael just in time to see him slip two white pills into his mouth. He shrugged. “Helps keep me awake.”

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  The mechanic looked up from the engine and drew a finger across his throat. “It’s finished.”

  Michael sighed. “Can it be fixed?”

  “It’s old. It wants to die.”

  “But I don’t want it to die.”

  “Such is life.”

  Michael concentrated on his wounded foot. “Do you have another?”

  “Another opinion?”

  “Another truck.”

  “To buy? Right now?”

  “This moment.”

  “I admire your style.” He smiled to Gina. “Is he this way with his women too?”

  “In all things but his past.”

  “I’ve seen the past,” the mechanic nodded. “It’s not as good as they say.”

  “I agree,” Michael said, and he knew this was a piece of it. Old men like the mechanic, in tattered sweaters and philosophy, had once been everywhere. But they were disappearing from the villages, expendable weight in the race for a future somehow more Teutonic than French. Such men had courage and memories, and the courage of memory was
a sometimes dangerous thing in France.

  “I have a truck.”

  At least that’s what he called it, one of those horrendous Renault clatter traps with corrugated metal floors, three speeds, and a rubber-band engine. “Does it run?” Michael asked.

  “It has never failed me.”

  “When was the last time you drove it?”

  “1968.” The bed was big enough. Barely. “I’ll give you a good price.”

  At that moment an army truck rumbled past, full of weapon-ready conscripts, and Michael was standing there, right in plain view, and they didn’t stop. He watched the soldiers fade, waited for his heart to steady, then turned to the mechanic. “I need it today.”

  They agreed on a price, US dollars from the money Hector had given him, and the old mechanic spent fifteen minutes oiling, fussing, and wiping down the dust inside with a rag. He helped load the box, and Michael tried to hide his lame foot, for surely it marked him. But then the casket, which the man never inquired after, probably marked them more than anything. They settled the tarp, settled the paperwork, on which Michael lied from one end to the other, and Gina and he got inside.

  “The battery is good but low. It will be fine after an hour or so.” With that he gave them a push, Gina let the clutch pop, and the engine started gasping in neck-crunching bursts. “Choke! Choke!” the mechanic cried out. She yanked on it and the engine revved uncontrollably. “Less choke! Less choke!” He was running alongside them now, coaching her. “There, you have it!” He stopped, let the Renault rattle away and called out to them, “Enjoy your vacation!”

  First stop on said vacation was another license plate off a field junker. The afternoon had turned warm and swooned with lavender and thyme. Vineyards appeared at Mollans, and Michael had an idea. They bought bread and meats at a market in Entrechaux, pilfered some wooden crates, and under the cover of a vineyard hedge, filled them with stolen grapes so ripe you could see the liquid slosh inside. The crates they stacked in the rear of the Renault, hiding Evita’s box.

  “So now you’re a farmer,” Gina said.

  “A real farmer wouldn’t have bought this truck.”

  “How’s your foot?”

  “Killing me.”

  Out of Entrechaux, in daylight, they traveled down the volcanic side of Mont Ventoux, where the land became the south: brushy hills, cypress trees, people hanging out on doorsteps. The drive was slow, for there were lumbering harvesters everywhere. A provincial cop went past and didn’t brake and U-turn. There was nothing to do but accept the favor and keep on.

  Michael closed his eyes and listened to the vibrations of the truck. When he opened them they were among castles ruined by time and villages by war.

  “Where are we?”

  “Near Avignon.”

  It was getting dark. After a few kilometers he told her to take the next road. She did, and it fumbled along past once-grand estates. The farther they went, the creepier the road became, until Michael told her to stop.

  They were in front of a mansion probably considered gentle in its time. Set back behind a wide garden run riot, its tall, latticed windows were mostly broken. “Pull into the drive.”

  “Here?”

  “We can stay.”

  “Michael, it’s barely dark. I can keep driving. We’re nearly halfway to Spain.”

  “No. We’ll stay here.”

  They got out of the truck, Michael limping ahead, leading her up the front steps. The inside was empty but not as ruined as she expected. There was a smell of feral cats. “This way.”

  He seemed to know where he was going and Gina followed, up marble steps into a grand suite lit purple with twilight. He stood in its center, pointed to a square of oak floor darker than the rest. “The bed would have been here.” He pointed to another, smaller square. “The chair, maybe, there.”

  “Why are we here, Michael?”

  He stared at imaginary furniture and told her of how, when Evita arrived in Paris as part of her 1947 European tour, she requested an audience with the pope. While it was arranged, she was brought here to wait. Her personal assistants left for Rome to prepare, and she was left with a small French staff of strangers. What no one realized was that until then, in her entire life, Evita had never spent a night alone.

  There had always been brothers and sisters in her bed. Or men. And finally Perón. Even in Paris one of her maids slept with her. But when the sun went down in this room, she was alone. Later, the French staff reported that Eva Perón, First Lady of Argentina and one of the most powerful women in the world, had pushed a chair against the door and wept all night in terror.

  He looked out at fading light through broken windows. Sparrows had begun their nightly insect hunt. “There are a thousand stories of her being arrogant, cunning, vengeful. This is the only story I know of her being scared.” He turned to Gina, and only half his face was lit in afterglow. “I’m sorry I brought you here. You’re right. We should have kept driving.”

  She hadn’t noticed how red his eyes had become, the jitteriness in his hands. She reached out and took one. “Why don’t we bring her in so she isn’t lonely?”

  They placed the box near where the bed would have been and lit the fireplace, cobwebs alighting and drifting through the room like Gaelic fairies. Gina pulled down the musty drapes into a heap, and they sat among them with the bread, meat, and grapes.

  “Does she seem truly real to you, Michael? Something more than just a box?”

  “Do you want to see her?”

  Her voice faltered. “It never occurred to me.”

  “It’s okay.” He stood and limped to the box. He worked at the bolts, but a few were determinedly frozen. He hit them with the base of a wine bottle and the screech was like grave robbing.

  “Michael…”

  But the lid was open. And against her will, Gina walked toward it. Michael’s shadow kept the contents in darkness, but as Gina came slowly alongside he stepped away and the firelight bathed her. “Oh my God…”

  “Dr. Ara, the man who embalmed her, spent a year and a hundred thousand dollars doing it. Each night he slept in the room with her, so she wouldn’t be alone.”

  After nineteen years moisture had stained the casket’s silk lining and the tip of her nose had broken off. “Month after month, he submerged her in baths of acetate and potassium nitrate. Month after month he injected into her formol, thymol, and pure alcohol in secret combinations only he knew. Month after month he coated her in thin layers of liquid plastic.”

  Gina turned away. “How could they do that to someone?”

  Michael studied Evita’s face a moment, then shut the lid. “She belongs to the people.”

  “How could the people have done that?”

  “They did it from the beginning. From the first day they saw her. They lifted her and changed her and made her theirs. They never cared who she really was. They don’t now. Men have fought and died for her, and who she really was doesn’t matter at all. In fact it’s probably better for them that she’s dead. Now the only sound she can make is what they put in her mouth.”

  “Is there anything left of her?”

  “Everything. That was Ara’s genius. Everything but the blood.”

  Gina went back and sat among the drapes. “She’s nothing but a flag to them.”

  “Yes.”

  “And to you?”

  “A flag of a different kind.”

  “What kind, Michael?”

  He stepped carefully back to their makeshift bed and lowered himself. “A promise.”

  “A flag for a promise?”

  “A flag for one promise kept.”

  Gina stared into the flames. “You knew her.”

  “A part of her.”

  “I think we die twice. The first time is physical. The second is when the memory of us dies. When the people who loved us for who we were are gone. That’s when we’re truly dead.” She turned to him. “Everyone who knew her as a person is dying. One day you could b
e the last.”

  “And when I die?”

  “Then she’ll be truly nothing but a stuffed flag.”

  29.

  It was dark but the air still gusted a hot madness that cracked Hector’s nose membranes. For the second time he wiped blood from them, standing there in Juan Perón’s library at the villa at 6 Calle de Navalmanzano. Outside, Madrid was rising and looking for dinner. It was a thick book in Hector’s hands, History of South American Horses, horses being one of the general’s obsessions, and the only one that seemed to raise him anymore.

  “My first cavalry horse. A criollo. There’s a picture in there of it. God, I loved that horse. A wonderful book, no?”

  Hector looked in the direction of the voice and found an oil painting of the General. Commissioned at the height of his vitality and popularity, he was an imposing man, ramrod straight in brown uniform and presidential sash.

  The man sitting beneath the portrait wore a stained Hawaiian shirt, faded slacks, and no shoes. His voice was weak, and gray tufts of hair bushed from his nose. “Yes,” Hector said to General Juan Perón, “it’s a lovely book.”

  “You never rode, Hector?”

  “I was weak as a child.”

  “Ha! Weak like a snake!”

  Hector closed the book and returned it to the shelf.

  “They say I cannot ride anymore,” Perón said. “What good am I? Seventy-eight and now I drink tea for whiskey, eat soup for beef, sleep with a bar dancer for…” Still, after all these years, he couldn’t bring himself to utter her name.

  “Good enough to be president again.”

  “Bah. A nation of imbeciles. They eat themselves until there is only a mouth left, and now the mouth wants me, a man who has not set foot in that cursed land for sixteen years.”

  “The junta has agreed to elections. The Peronists—your Peronists—will win. You will return as their true leader, bringing peace to your home.”

  “Spain is my home now. I expected to die here. I may still.”

  “You will return with Her.”

  Perón’s eyes reflexively rose to the attic they were enlarging for her arrival. The man was a ruin. A shell. He rose late, was in bed by nine, spent his days wandering an unfashionable villa given him by Franco, his old friend who had not bothered to visit in the years Perón had been here. “Yes,” Perón said quietly, gazing through the ceiling into the attic, “the mouth must ultimately have its fill. Even of the dead.”