‘You stripped,’ I said, grabbing at her chair and hauling her closer, ‘while I slept in a park and stole things.’
I leant in and kissed her. She put her hand behind my ear and softly bit my lip. We only pulled back from each other when the next dancer stepped down off the stage and walked the tables, a peroxide blonde with short spiked hair, her body pierced and painted with tattoos. Kay asked if I’d guessed her own design yet.
‘The one lasered off?’
‘The only one.’
I didn’t want to guess and get it badly wrong, so I joked. ‘An anchor, or your regiment in the marines.’
‘You know, I love your fooling around as much as everything else. Nothing is taken too seriously. I like that.’
‘So it was the anchor?’
She waved me off with her hand, sat back with her rum and Coke.
‘You have to tell me now.’
‘Work it out.’
‘I need a hint.’
She thought for a second. ‘It’s the only bird that can fly backwards.’
I stalled, asked her why she had it lasered off.
‘I didn’t.’ She drank again then shook her head. ‘He paid for it to be removed. Chris. He insisted I lose that part of my past.’ She swirled the ice cubes to get the last drop of rum. ‘As if your memory is kept in the ink of a tattoo, just erased when the picture is.’
AGAINST THE BLACK SKIES and slate grey water of the Mississippi, above the moss-clad trees that stumbled through the swampland like a ragtag army of grey and bearded men, the flames of oil refineries burned in the gloom.
‘Could it look any more like the end of the world?’ Kay looked from the road to the fires on the horizon. She was driving the rental car we’d picked up in New Orleans, heading west into a storm, an alien landscape that helped keep us disconnected from what we were actually doing.
I glanced from the elevated highway to the waterlogged forest, thought of alligators and snakes. ‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ I warned. ‘We’ll get eaten if you crash here.’
‘You’re the guy who totals signposts.’
I saw tumbledown shacks on rafts of barrels, chimney smoke drawn from sagging roofs.
‘Shall we live in one of these hillbilly homes?’
Kay shuddered. ‘Can you imagine?’
‘How far would you follow me into the swamp?’
She shook her head. ‘We’d be dead by sundown. Locals or the gators.’
Deeper into the black and towering clouds, past the refinery, a floating city of pipes and flames. Kay drove fast, accelerated into the rain when it came hard and spattering against the windscreen.
‘At least I bought a coat.’
We’d woken up and gone shopping in New Orleans, Kay buying a suitcase and a whole new wardrobe as she’d travelled with nothing but her self and the clothes she was wearing, the clothes she had on when she walked out the door. Before leaving the hotel she’d unzipped the suitcase and thrown the old ones in the bin.
It wasn’t until we had the hire car, again paid for on Segur’s credit card, that we talked about the night before, the strip club, the lasered tattoo.
‘I should’ve given you a harder clue,’ said Kay.
‘But I only got it in the dream.’
That morning I told her she had another life in my sleep. Another form. That I’d again been in the forest of dead trees, walking, and this time there was no running woman. I’d broken through the branches, clambered over fallen trunks, until I heard the applause of pebbles turned in breaking waves. I could see a woman curled up on a beach, the way a child might be found in a fairy tale, hatched from a stone. Gulls lifted on the breeze like scraps of paper. Giant sequoia towered along the shoreline, and the wind through the higher boughs was oceanic, as if some ghost of sea tangled there with the clouds.
‘It was you,’ I’d told Kay in bed, the two of us lying side by side, her stare fixed on mine as though she could see the dream in my eyes.
‘You sat up. The wind blew your hair from your face. You said that if I looked along the coastline I might see San Francisco, your old house.’
But all I could see was a salt-sprayed wilderness, a shore of rock and rain where bears, ignoring our presence on the beach, had climbed down from trees and hooked fish in the foaming surf.
‘And the man was you?’ she’d asked. ‘You were standing there watching you?’
Beyond the haze and spray of broken waves, a figure had appeared. A man, walking, emerging from the distance.
‘I think it was me,’ I’d guessed. ‘But I wasn’t sure if it was actually the beach sliding towards the man.’
He, me, the man, stepped over driftwood, past scoured and polished trunks. He walked up the beach towards Kay. She heard his footsteps crunching on the stones, and so did the bears in the surf, turning back to the dark of the woods.
‘You saved me from bears,’ she’d said, kissing me on the cheek, the forehead.
‘Only for you to turn into a hummingbird when I tried to hug you.’
She’d gasped when I told her this, jumped up on the bed before turning her shoulder blade to show me the scar. ‘It was a hummingbird,’ she’d nearly shouted. ‘And you dreamed I was a hummingbird?’
I’d said I really had.
‘Did I fly away?’
‘You fluttered around my head. I could see dazzling emerald green. You were a tiny thrumming jewel, hovering over the flowers which had bloomed between the pebbles.’
‘See, I was just showing my wings off to you.’
I’d leant forward and pulled her back down to the bed, kissed her neck and shoulders.
I don’t think I lied, retelling the dream how I had.
I’d just refrained from mentioning the end, how one of the bears that watched her from the trees had sharpened his claws on the bark before coming out of the shadows and across the beach.
About an hour past Baton Rouge we had a turkey dinner, ‘With all the fixin’s,’ sparked the waitress, in a roadside restaurant chain called the Cracker Barrel.
‘This is the high life,’ Kay had joked, looking around at elderly couples too frail to be cooking up their own Thanksgiving meal, spooning on extra cranberry sauce, sneaking bread buns into bags then asking for more to box up and take home.
I ate mouthfuls of stuffing and gravy, tried to avoid the sudden ordinariness of where we were. In a mock southern diner with men dribbling pie down their plaid shirts.
‘You’re thinking about Jenni, aren’t you?’
‘Hard not to.’
Kay chased the rest of her turkey around the plate without catching it, as did I, before saying, ‘We’d better get moving if we want to hit Corpus Christi before it gets dark.’
We’d decided on this as our destination for no other reason than that we liked the name and knew it was on the Gulf of Mexico. We got the bill and thanked the bus boy, an old black man who walked with a crooked polio limp and collected our plates, shuffling back to the kitchen with the knives and forks clattering on the china with each troublesome step.
‘You want to drive?’ asked Kay. ‘Keep your mind from other things.’
I took the keys and walked to the car. The rain clouds had cleared, and bright sun beat on the parking lot. I could have cried. But instead I opened the door and clicked in the seatbelt, then fired up the engine.
‘DON’T GET QUIET ON me, Sam.’ We were well beyond the Mississippi delta, driving past towns that looked alike, a strip mall kit of gas stations, fast food restaurants and car dealerships lined with discounted SUVs. ‘We’ve been through harder things than this before.’
When I switched lanes, pulling from between two thundering rigs, I said, ‘It’s not us left in the wreckage.’
Kay didn’t respond for a minute, and I thought it was because there was no answer, no magic words to let us off lightly for abandoning our lovers.
‘Well I don’t know if you do, but don’t feel guilty for Chris.’
Part of me d
id, and perhaps she knew that so told me something to erase that impostor of a feeling.
‘Have you ever hit Jenni?’
‘God, no.’ I nearly swerved into another lane.
‘Well, whatever I’ve thought of him in the past, he’s not man enough to hold back on an occasional slap.’
If she wanted to upend my mood she had. The thought of Segur hurting her stirred up my emotions. I revved the engine, touched a hundred before she said, ‘Better you’re angry than sad.’
I slowed back to eighty, took a breath, and arrowed the car past Houston, south.
*
The afternoon sky was so blue, the morning rain seemed a feat of our imagination. Ribbons of cirrus burned away as soon as we noticed them. The odd jetliner, high and remote on the stellar edge, was hard to associate with the ancient landscape of dead creosote and rattlesnakes.
‘We’re in nut country now,’ Kay had remarked as we left the Houston suburbs. ‘And you know who said that?’
‘You. Right then.’
‘Way before me, the day he was shot.’
‘JFK?’
‘He whispered it to Jackie when they drove out of the airport.’
It was nearly noon, and very bright on the highway, chrome fenders and windshields dazzling.
‘Nut country,’ I repeated, looking at the stark landscape.
‘It’s so flat.’ Kay had taken off her shoes and rested her bare feet on the dashboard. ‘I love those mirages that look like lakes.’
The horizon wobbled, tremored with sun and distance. Silos and barns the only features. Passing the small towns, Wharton, Edna and El Campo, where county sheriffs sat with speed guns, where old men sat on porches and watched us drive by, Kay fell asleep, a smile on her face like a toddler. And I watched her chest rise and fall as much as I watched the empty highway, all that horizon, the empty sky filled by her.
She woke when I pulled into a rest stop outside Victoria. Although a break from the wheel was due, I pulled over because I needed her with me, talking. She stretched and sighed.
‘How long was I asleep for?’
‘A hundred miles.’
‘I slept a hundred miles of my life away.’
‘Not away.’ I leant over and kissed her, as if rousing a woman from a spelled dream.
We walked across to the rest rooms. I splashed my face with water from the drinking fountain. Then I hurried from the building with a sudden fear of abandonment. A child’s fear, that someone I loved could open and close a door and never return.
In the car park two teenagers were throwing rocks at a snake backed against a junction box. I warned them that if they left it alone I’d leave them alone. The boys eyed me warily and dropped the rocks.
‘You told them,’ said Kay, linking her arm round mine. ‘No one’s throwing things at me with you around.’
Taking the ramp on to the highway she said she had the memory that she might have once hitched from that very same spot.
‘But I’ve never been further south than Austin,’ she added. ‘Maybe I inherited the memory of my dad. His life as a professional bum after Vietnam.’
‘Do you know about his life before he met your mum?’
‘The best, and only real conversation I ever had with him. He told me in a prison visiting room. Through my teens I got it in weekly instalments.’
‘Vietnam?’
‘Never. Just what happened after. How he made sense of the world through whisky. Days of drifting round the country on a Greyhound bus.’
I asked if he knew what had happened to her.
‘Kind of. I think my mom liked to use it against him, say it was his fault and not hers.’
I drove on. Kay sat back in her seat to talk. ‘Funny, but I felt like I should have been in a war, too. Those were the people I was hanging out with, vets, Vietnam and Iraq. About every bum I asked a light from had served somewhere. Some begged with their regiment scratched on the sidewalk, an empty sleeve flapping where an arm should be. The lost vets were the tumbleweed rolling down a deserted street.’
She told me about days and weeks erased from her life. Flashes of towns and faces still came to her in extraordinary moments. ‘As if the thought had been put there by someone else.’
I reached across, stroked the inside of her forearm.
‘He came back from war and took a job on a farm. Then quit a week later. All that space, nowhere for his mind to run and hide. He got a room above a roadhouse in Wyoming. Trucks rolled in and out all night, but the juddering rigs were a welcome distraction from his dreams. When he ran out of money the owner gave him credit for doing odd jobs like fixing up chairs and tables after bar fights, sweeping broken glass from the urinals and generally maintaining a run-down establishment.’
I stopped abruptly for a red light, nearly skidding, so taken by her father’s story, which in turn had become her story, that I wasn’t concentrating on driving.
‘He shined the surface of the bar where he sat each night with his elbow. He only left his stool to piss, or follow women on to the dance floor. Later they’d slam into each other on his bed of broken springs then wake and both wonder how they’d got there.’
I saw tears in her eyes. ‘You okay?’
‘See,’ she said. ‘I’m my mom.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He met her in that roadhouse. He watched her sit on the edge of his dresser and shoot heroin into her foot. He called her a dumb bitch then finished off a bottle of whisky. The third day in a row he vomited blood the owner put a hundred dollars in his hand and asked him to leave. He said he was sorry, but if he poured him another drink the police would charge him with murder.’
‘And your mum?’
‘Long gone. It was years before my dad found me, his daughter.’
Kay told me how her father walked, hitched, fell asleep in ditches and shook uncontrollably on the back seats of buses while his body rattled with drink and death. He hiked for weeks across the Midwest and watched storm clouds gather above the Great Plains. He walked through electric rain in Idaho and stood in the corn like some ragged scarecrow waiting for judgement. But nothing.
‘And then the rain stopped, the fields turned gold, and he followed the setting sun all the way to California.’ She said this with theatrical irony, throwing out her hands.
‘And found you,’ I stated. ‘He came and found you.’
‘He did,’ she said. ‘And then he just vanished again.’ She looked to the fields beyond the roadside, acres of sky. Then she unbuckled her seatbelt and laid her head across my lap.
We were still an hour from Corpus Christi when it got dark, the deep blue rising up from the eastern horizon like a sheet of litmus paper drawing ink. Then for miles nothing but the road rushing beneath the wheels, kamikaze moths in the headlights. And no stars, thick cloud moving to blot out the universe. Maybe no light anywhere in space and time but the cone of the car beams. And the dashboard glow casting us in green, our ghostly faces. Then from the blackness came trucks howling and rattling, the rigs illuminated with neon so you could see the painted women on the doors. Women like the cartoon belles on Second World War bombers, reclining on a fuselage above smoke and ruin.
‘The gods have pointed their fingers and cursed us,’ said Kay, trying to find something to see in the dark night. ‘We’re forever bound to drive south Texas and never arrive anywhere.’
I hoped not. My blurry eyes knew nothing but car lights. Finally we saw a burn of white on the horizon.
‘It’s bigger than I thought,’ said Kay, looking at the dazzle of downtown, the towers and office blocks lit like warnings for passing ships. Then the closer we got, the more we realized something was wrong with the skyline.
‘Was that fire?’ I asked. ‘A burst of fire from the top of that building.’
Orange flares. Giant match heads igniting in the dark.
Kay leant forward in her seat. ‘It’s a city of oil pipes,’ she said, studying the wraiths of flame.
<
br /> The metropolis, hissing, torched and burning, was another refinery. Steel and fire lighting up the evening for miles, as if it were an automated hell built for show.
Half an hour later we pulled into a quiet Corpus Christi, both of us tired and car stale from the day’s drive. It somehow seemed a let-down that we’d escaped New Orleans, dodged the diesel-chugging rigs and kept sane on the pancake flats and dead highways of south Texas to disembark without some kind of welcome. Driving about looking for a motel we had our first tiff.
‘Just take this one,’ said Kay, looking at a Best Western in the business district.
‘But we’re by the sea,’ I countered. ‘We can’t stay in a downtown hotel when we can wake to a sea view.’
‘Does it matter?’ She was tired. ‘We can go to the beach in the morning.’
I was adamant that we should open the curtains on to ocean, not office blocks. ‘Let’s at least try the sea front.’
Kay sighed hard, looked at the entrance to the Best Western. ‘A bed’s a bed.’
‘A sea view would be nice.’
‘Getting out of this car would be better,’ she replied curtly.
I drove on in silence, then she apologized. And so did I. ‘There’s not many days in life like this.’
‘We’ll have better ones if we’re lucky.’ She leant across and kissed me. ‘And the driver rules.’
‘That sounds like a good idea. When I’m at the wheel.’
She playfully slapped my arm, not unlike the way Jenni would have, then perked up and wound down the window. ‘There’s definitely an ocean out there.’
I could smell sea, hear the squawk of gulls. The next junction I took a right on to the bay front, deserted and dark but for the sign of a Super 8 motel, yellow and bright.
‘We’ve got our bed,’ said Kay.
AFTER WE MADE LOVE in a motel bed, after Kay crossed her legs tight round the small of my back, she’d said, ‘Don’t you dare let go of me.’
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 17