The Listener

by Robert McCammon

  The woman of many names sank down to her knees but slowly, as if defying gravity and her mortal wound. She leaned forward on both hands. Blood spooled from her mouth. Curtis had fallen again and was crawling toward Nilla and Little Jack. The woman gave a shudder. Her head moved from side to side as if seeking out the one who’d stabbed her.

  Curtis saw her eyes find and fix upon him.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  And again, with a rasp of indignant anger: “Who are you? Who…are you? Who—”

  Her elbows gave way and her face fell forward, her eyes and mouth still open and filling up with Lake Pontchartrain water and mud, her secrets likewise buried in the muck. The lance’s shaft stuck up from her back like the pole of a victory flag.

  Curtis lay on his side.

  Nilla reached him first. Little Jack tried to walk but his bad ankle gave way and he just sat down, his face blanked with shock.

  “Curtis!” Nilla said, and seeing his mangled face and all the blood she began to weep. “Curtis!” she said. “Curtis…oh…Curtis!” She put her head down against his, as the lake washed against them both.

  :That’s my name,: he answered, but even face-to-face like this it was a weak sending. :Don’t wear it out.:

  “Talk to me!” she begged. “Please!”

  :Am talkin’. Not so good at the other way no more.:

  “We’ve got to get out of here…get help…somebody…”

  Curtis tried his best to speak. It was with an effort that he thought might be his last. “Comin’.” And then, back to what he could do. :Police. Mizz Ripp…gone for ’em.:

  “Nilla,” Little Jack said tonelessly, “I think…somebody’s lyin’ over there under the steps.”

  :Shot dead,: said Curtis.

  It would be Mister Parr, Nilla knew. The other gunshot they’d heard. The woman had killed him before she’d come in after them.

  With a shudder and a gasping of breath through the mud in her mouth, Vesta suddenly sat up.

  As Curtis, Nilla and Little Jack looked on in horror, the woman struggled to her feet. She fell again, and again fought her way up. Her back was toward them, and she did not try to turn around or disturb the lance that pierced her body or the nail-pocked piece of board in the side of her neck. She began walking into the lake, step after step, and watching her through the descent of red haze in his vision Curtis thought she might be a traveller at the Union Station, crossing the marbled tiles to catch a train for an unknown destination.

  She kept going as the water rose past her knees, up her thighs, and to her waist. Very suddenly she halted her progress and stood in place against the night and the stars. She remained there for several seconds, standing perfectly still in the grip of the lake, until at last she fell backward with an almost graceful motion, one hand flying up as if to give the world a final gesture of contempt. The folds of her dress floated around her, and her body swayed upon the water like any old piece of debris torn from what had once been a life.

  It was over, Curtis thought. Whatever evil engine had powered that woman…it was gone.

  “Is she dead?” Little Jack called to them, a cry both frantic and dazed. “Is she dead?”

  :Won’t hurt you anymore,: Curtis told her, and she said to her brother, “The police are coming. We’re going to be all right.”

  “Yeah…yeah…but is she dead?”

  Neither Curtis nor Nilla could make out the body any longer. Nilla didn’t want to leave Curtis, get the flashlight and look for the woman; she was terrified that she would see her shambling back to shore to drag them all to a watery grave. She said, “She’s dead, Jack. Just shut up now, hear?”

  “Hell with it, then,” he answered, which sounded just like their father.

  “Our daddy,” she said to Curtis. “Is he…I mean—”

  :Alive when I left him. I just…I don’t know.:

  Nilla figured that was the best answer she could get, at the moment. Someone had beaten Curtis badly, he’d been through torment, and she feared that he was dying right in front of her. She couldn’t stand it, that she could do nothing to help him, that he’d come so far and done so much for both of them, and now…all she could do was offer him a listener.

  “They’ll be here soon,” she told him. “I know they will be.”

  :Soon,: he agreed. :Mizz Ripp…she won’t let us down.:

  “Get you to a hospital,” Nilla said. “Oh, Curtis…without you…what would’ve happened?”

  :Nothin’ good to speak of,: he answered. :Goin’ home soon. Yes, you are.:

  She was silent, and he stared up at the stars.

  The pain wasn’t so bad, but he was getting cold. Funny, on such a warm and humid night as this, to be feeling a chill. But it was morning, wasn’t it? What time might it be? Well, the sun would rise in a few hours, and Nilla and Little Jack were free. That was the important thing.

  Curtis was not afraid. He knew the police wouldn’t be there in time for him, and any hospital was too far away. No. He knew it, like he knew the schedules of the trains. He felt himself weakening; he felt himself going away, as if he were dissolving into the very earth itself.

  But he had done the right thing, he thought. It seemed to him that any right thing called for a price to be paid. He was glad to pay this one, and he had no regrets about it. His life for theirs…a small price, he thought.

  “Hang on,” Nilla said. Her voice was choked, because she also knew. “Please hang on.”

  :I’ll try,: he replied, :but…my fingers…they’re gettin’ some tired.:

  “What?” she asked. “I could hardly hear.”

  Even that was going away.

  He wondered if they would’ve done the same thing. Them. The knights. Sir Tristram…Sir Gawain…Sir Lancelot…Sir Dynadan…Sir Galahad…all the rest of them. Would they have done the same thing? He hoped that if they lived in some other form, in some other place, they might welcome his approach…and one of them—or their shadows or shades in that mystical place—might stand before him and say the most wonderful thing.

  Enter in.

  “Thank you, Curtis,” said the damsel. “Thank you so much for what you’ve done.”

  His eyes were closed but he was still breathing, though shallowly, when she and Little Jack heard the siren coming. It was back a ways, on a road that connected to the parking lot behind the marina. Nilla put her fingertips against Curtis’s cheek. She said, close to his ear, “The police are here! I’m going to go meet them. Hang on, Curtis. Please…they’re here. Do you understand?”

  She heard his reply, and she was amazed that in it he sounded as strong as what he had always been.

  :I do understand,: he said.

  She stood up. She and her brother climbed the small rise to the parking lot. Little Jack was limping badly on the injured ankle that his fall off the porch had not helped. But they were both rewarded by the sight of the oncoming red pulse of the police car’s spinning light…no…there were two police cars, one following right after the other, both with sirens and lights going.

  Nilla looked back toward the lake in time to see it.

  Afterward, she never knew if it was the brightness of the police cars’ spinners or her own exhaustion and imagination, and she never told anyone about it either, but it seemed to her that she caught a flash of almost incandescent light—a streak of it—not going directly upward but rather upward and out, like a meteor flying across the lake…but it was a strange thing, because it was so small…just a little thing…as small as a bird.

  And it was gone, in a heartbeat.

  FIVE.

  Listening

  Twenty-Six.

  It was true that the Devil could be a man or a woman. That the Devil could be the hard spring in the seat of a car, a gnat in the eye or the whack of a wooden baton on the iron bars of a jail cell. True also that the Devil could get behind the wheel of that car with the hard spring in the seat, and drive crazy and wild with no regard for any human being, and caus
e one hundred and ten million kinds of suffering for anybody and everybody until the Devil, he drives that car right over the cliff and it smashes to pieces on the sharp rocks underneath.

  “Then,” said the widowed Methodist preacher who married Orchid Mayhew in the autumn of 1938, “the Devil runs for cover because the Devil, he don’t clean up after he wrecks the car. Nossir! It’s the Good Father who comes in and cleans up. Puts that broken engine together. New lamps in those busted headlights. New glass in the windshield. Fresh new tires, so the car that was wrecked by the Devil’s hand—the Devil’s bad, bad drivin’—is ready to go afresh for many, many more miles.

  “Now why don’t the Good Father stop that Devil from gettin’ behind the wheel of that car to begin with?” he asked the congregation of the Beloved Savior Methodist Church of Ville Platte, Louisiana. “We all want to know that, don’t we? Why is the question we ask. Well, I am human and am afflicted in the human way of not bein’ able to know the true will of God, but I do know this: whatever wreckage you’re facin’, however bad it seems, however much it looks like your engine is broken and will never ever run again…the Good Father is a mighty, mighty fine mechanic. If you let Him be. If you give up that old car the Devil’s drove off the cliff. Let the Good Father work on it, ’cause the Devil…he done run for the low country.”

  In October of 1934 Orchid had moved from New Orleans to her family’s farm a few miles outside Ville Platte. She was able to offer her Pap the two thousand dollars she had received as a gift from Mister Jack Ludenmere, and from part of that he was able to buy a much-needed new tractor. She moved into her old bedroom at the back of the house, where she languished until her Pap and Maw said she was going to go to the church picnic this year or they were going to put her in a basket and sell her as used laundry. She went, grudgingly, and that made all the difference.

  She and the Pastor Micah—Mikey, to her—had a happy home situated across the street from the church. She turned out to be a very able decorator, and some of the ladies of the church valued her eye in that way. When they visited her home, they never failed to ask about the beautiful glass with diamond-like facets around its base that sat on a little square of dark blue velvet in an alcove. “My nice glass,” she told them. “I don’t ever use it, but I keep it there…sort of in a place of honor. Waterford, it’s called. And…I don’t think there’ll ever be another one quite like it. Not in the whole world yet to come.”

  The ladies agreed. It was indeed a very nice glass.

  Wendell Crable used part of the two thousand dollars he received from Mister Jack Ludenmere to buy himself a fine radio. At night he listened to the world, and by day he kept it moving. He was seventy-two years old when he left his employment as master of the Redcaps in 1937. He saw many young men come and go, he mentored some and hurried some off, because his main concern was keeping the distress out of his house. On the day of his official retirement he was honored with a plaque for exceptional service to the Union Station and its customers, which was placed on the wall that travellers passed in their hurry to get somewhere else, and stayed in its location until the terminal was torn down in 1954 to make room for the new one just across the street.

  Ol’ Crab passed away in March of 1941, and was laid to rest with his wife and his daughter in St. Louis Cemetery Number 1, almost within smelling distance of the incense and gumbo of Congo Square, and the hearing distance of its strengthening drumbeats.

  After his stay in the hospital, Clay Hartley got a new glass eye and continued to be a chauffeur to the Ludenmere family until the summer of 1942, when it was clear that at eighteen Nilla wanted to either drive herself or be chauffeured by her beaus, and L.J. at sixteen was gnawing his knuckles to get behind the wheel of a car. Hartley—Mister Hartley, the grown-up kids always called him—announced it was time to move on. He wanted to see Canada from coast to coast, and maybe while he was up that way he might head to Alaska too. It’s an open road, isn’t it? he’d said to his boss, and to that announcement of retirement Jack Ludenmere gave him a check for ten thousand dollars and a brand new Chrysler Town and Country station wagon with wood panels on the sides.

  The pressure for L.J. Ludenmere to take over his father’s business was intense. The issue was settled when L.J., as a junior at LSU in 1945, went with some classmates to Atlanta and wound up at a provocative-sounding play titled Kiss And Tell. The play wasn’t that provocative, but one of the young actresses—Sophie Haydon by name—so enthralled L.J. that he had to meet her. He wound up making his father explode and his mother reach for her medicines when he abandoned college and trailed Miss Haydon to Hollywood. In short order he found that being a success at anything in Hollywood was a tougher challenge than following in his father’s footsteps, but he refused to fall back on his family’s money…mostly because his father had cut him off at the roots.

  L.J. got a job in the mailroom of a public relations firm and in four years had an office with a window. He became known as a hard-charger, a guy who could curse the paint off the walls, but also a man with big, solid ideas and the ability to bring together many different viewpoints. The term “Ask L.J.” became the key phrase in the firm of SBMW Associates, and when Battels retired the name was changed to SJMW Associates. In 1959 he married Amy Vee Vallant of the Texas oil Vallant family, who he met during a children’s hospital fund-raising function in Dallas. They had two boys and a girl, and L.J. and the family flew back to New Orleans on occasion to see the old house and the stomping grounds, and to beat at golf the old man who could still swing for the green in his late seventies.

  A little girl in Texas grew up not to be scarred by a hideous sight she came upon on a July morning in 1934, but to be both outraged and empowered by it. She threw herself fiercely into her school studies, both elementary and high school, won a math scholarship to Baylor University, and developed organizational skills that she used in what she considered to be her mission in life. At the age of 32, in 1955, Mrs. Jodi Edson Fullerton—math teacher at Roy Miller High School in Corpus Christi—was flown to New York City along with five other recipients, all who had earned awards for community service from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

  Even long afterward, Nilla thought she could hear him.

  She thought for sure she heard in her head the crackling sounds like that of the old classical records her mama used to play, which to her meant that their power was on, their tubes had lit up, and they were connected again. Sometimes at night she woke up hearing it, and she would send out into the dark, :Are you there, Curtis? I’m here. I’m listening.:

  But never did he answer.

  She did not ask her father if the woman’s body had been found. She decided it had been, and that was all she needed. If it hadn’t been found, that meant the alligators had torn it to pieces.

  So there.

  When she was thirteen she heard someone sending out a hello. She answered, and it turned out to be a ten-year-old girl named Denise Bishop whose family had just moved from Memphis to Gulfport, Mississippi, where her father worked on a tugboat. Denise said that before the move she’d been talking to a young man in Mountain Home, Arkansas, who had gone off last year to join the Army, and she recalled that he said he used to talk to a woman who worked at the public library in Springdale, Arkansas, so there were others like themselves out there, only it was best to keep it quiet because not a whole lot of people could understand it.

  Nilla had said that, luckily for her, her parents did understand. She and Denise planned to meet, but it never happened. They communicated back and forth for nearly two years, their power turned on and the tubes glowing, and then quite suddenly Nilla started having trouble both talking and listening to Denise; it was as if her battery had simply reached its end, and though she tried to give herself time to recharge and she had short periods when everything was strong and clear, she realized there was a definite decay in the signal, and it was not going to last forever.

  At the age of fifteen, N
illa heard the telepathic “voice” of Denise Bishop fade out for the last time, and it was over.

  School became very important to her. That, and reading in the medical field: journals and books that were way over her head but she was bound and determined to absorb their information. She had never forgotten how helpless she felt kneeling beside Curtis that terrible night at the lake, unable to do a single thing to keep him alive; it had marked her, and now it drove her.

  She took an array of Red Cross courses, including emergency life-saving. It was the beginning.

  Nilla entered Tulane’s Medical School at the age of 24. Eight years later, after her residency requirements were met, she became Dr. Nilla Teresa Ludenmere, and a little over three years after that she became Mrs. Robert Hobart…actually, Mrs. Doctor Robert Hobart, her groom being a physician who had waded ashore at Normandy as a young medic on D-Day.

  In May of 1962, the two doctors and married couple opened a free clinic on Esplanade Avenue in the Faubourg Treme, not far from Marais Street where used to stand Prince Purdy’s barbershop, and two blocks past the vacant and littered lots where laughter used to spill out from the long-gone Fancy Acre, Ten Spot, and Done Didit clubs.

  In spite of the city’s wanting to change its name to honor the Confederate general Pierre Beauregard, the three acres of community park continued to be known as Congo Square to the residents of the Treme. But many of the local businesses and cafes were gone to the memory of the elderly, gone to dust and rust, decaying wood and fallen bricks.

  The row upon row of shotgun shacks remained.

  When anyone asked who the clinic was named after, Dr. Nilla Hobart said it was a friend of hers. A person who had meant so much to her life. A person, she said, who her father had once called her knight in shining armor. And the truth was, her father—as cantankerous and foul-mouthed as ever, especially after he lost a golf game to L.J.—still called her friend that, after all these years.