My father held out his hands for the keys, and I lay in the backseat, head on my jacket.
I woke up just before Las Cruces. It was almost four a.m. My father had been driving all night, with the static of AM radio pricking me now and then in the backseat. I sat up and looked at the dark outside, then at the front seat, where my father’s ancient green duffel bag was beside him. It was slightly open. His right knee almost touched it. I saw the glint of black metal on top of his clothes.
We were heading for Texas. He had a gun, too, and he made sure he could reach it anytime. The fear I’d felt for Victor raced lower this time, mixed with how scared I was for myself now, like someone scratching at my hip bones.
WEIMAR
A SHADOW STOOD over me in the dark.
“Fantine. Fantine.”
It wasn’t dawn yet. My father blocked the irritating light that shone from the parking lot into the backseat. I struggled to sit up. The phone thudded to the floor. The backseat was covered with papers and CDs. I had put Victor’s notebooks, the ones from his room, in the messenger bag. Had I tried to write notes about Luzern and Zurich? My head was filled with black—like magnetic filings. My tongue felt like a cactus pad stuffed into my mouth.
My phone showed no messages. His voicemail was full. Victor was out there somewhere, lost. Maybe he liked being lost. Maybe he didn’t want to be found. Brought back to his mother’s old room, with Joan of Arc on the wall.
We were in the parking lot of the gas station in Las Cruces. We had slept for a few hours. It was six a.m.
This was how we had come when I was ten. Glorette and I had slept in the back of the truck during the early morning, covered with sheets and blankets, and then sitting against the cab sipping on the chocolate milk cartons my father bought at the gas station.
We rode up front with my father in the afternoons, when the sun would have cooked us facing west. Lafayette and Reynaldo were fifteen and sixteen, the stars of the Linda Vista High School football team, and the coach said they had to stay for practice that summer or quit. Someone had died, and my father had to help with the cane planting. We were old enough to work.
The cane was razor sharp. It had cut us on the forearms. In college, I’d met girls who sliced themselves shallow with razor blades, in nearly the same place, and I’d touched my own scars—thin and white like threads on my skin, but not deliberate and lined up. The cane cuts were random graffiti on my arms, faded now to invisibility.
The cousin was old—it was her husband who had died. Auguste was his name, and Glorette and I smirked hearing the old people talk in French. We went into the tiny house and he was laid out in a wooden box while people filed past him and filled a saucer on his chest with quarters to pay for his funeral and a band.
We lay cane in the furrows turned by a tractor that my father drove. We ate gumbo and court bouillon with rice. At night we slept in the same bed, smelling of bleach and sun, in the middle room of a shotgun house, while people sat in the kitchen on one side and the front room on the other, talking and drinking coffee for hours.
When I was in college, listening to people talk about their travels, and I began to write about foreign places, I wondered what it would have been like if we had spent that month in Provence, or on an Australian ranch, or in Cambridge. How much of Louisiana entered me, in the dirt I breathed behind the tractor, and the coffee beans ground by the old cousins, and the animals we ate? The chicken twirled like a toy in the hands of the old woman?
My father took his gun from the truck, back then, the first night. A rifle. He and the other men shot rabbits because the fields were cleared for planting. The women skinned the rabbits and the membrane was purple gloss.
Now he had a smaller gun. In the faded green duffel bag near his feet. The same bag he’d brought last time. The bag he’d had since World War II. He was hunting again.
My legs were stiff. My black jeans were damp around the waistband, and too long without boots, so I had to roll them up. Nice look. Went along with the second boy undershirt from the pack.
We ate Danish and drank coffee in the front seat. “We’re looking for Albert. Claudine’s son. Maman told me a long time ago about Mr. McQuine.” My heart beat faster, from my fear to say it. “You killed him. And you have a gun in your bag?”
Suddenly I saw the Scion, lying on the floor of the dorm room. Mouth slack. The blood under his temples pulsing bluish as thin milk.
“So you’re gonna shoot Alfonso or Jazen?” I said.
He chewed slowly. “Non. They ain’t shoot me.”
“Jazen will shoot you, Papa. He doesn’t care. That’s what he does.” I looked out the window. Red sky at morning. “Did you shoot Mr. McQuine?”
“I never shoot none of em.” He finished his coffee and stared straight ahead.
“How many?”
“Three.”
“You killed somebody in Texas?”
He shook his head. “I ain’t had no gun in Texas. Not that time.” Then he slanted his head toward the wheel. “Allon.”
I drove across the Rio Grande. The freeway followed the river now. The water was to the west of us. All those cowboy movies, the Wild West, the cattle drives and shootouts and John Wayne. My father and Gustave used to watch them on a little black-and-white TV in the barn.
The duffle bag was in the back now. But the gun could be in the glove compartment. A handgun, not a rifle for gophers. Had my father been a knucklehead, a known associate, back in his day? Who else had he killed?
My father lit a Swisher Sweet. The wind blustered at the open windows. And he was silent.
He would tell me when he wanted to.
Just outside El Paso, we passed a roadside shrine. Three wrought-iron crosses, painted white, with dusty veladoras and bouquets of plastic flowers tied to the crosses. Names in plastic-encased circles in the center.
Had they been driving or walking? They were immortal now. This was the spot where their spirits had left their bodies. Like Mando’s spirit had left the sidewalk outside Dimples. Glorette’s spirit rose from an alley behind a taqueria. Sere Dakar’s rose from a dump along a freeway, and nothing marked his passage.
I could never tell Victor that.
The Rio Grande a few miles from here, where Mexicans swam across with their belongings in plastic on their heads, taken away now and then by the swirling current after a storm and who would ever know where their bodies ended up? Not in the Gulf of Mexico. The sea where my grandmother’s body, with her baby tucked inside her shirt, would have floated to eventually.
No shrine. No flowers. No candles. No bones.
The sun was right in our faces, blinding as a flashlight, when we crossed the border into Texas. I looked at my father. He said, “This West Texas. East Texas, pas meme chose.”
We left the Rio Grande behind at Esperanza. A town called Hope.
I played Astrud Gilberto. But I’d never been to Brazil. I had always wanted to, but I’d been afraid. Belize, but not Cuba. Argentina, but not Brazil. A fear of what I would be there, and in South Africa, and lots of other places. The blurred low tone of her voice, the guitar like beaten silver. After a while, my father said, “Where you missing?”
“What?”
“You go somewhere toujour. Where the next place? You miss a plane yet?”
“I’m not sure where I’m going yet,” I said. When I came home, he had always hovered near the conversation of my mother and the women on the gallery or in the kitchen, and then hours later he might ask: You eat good there—you never sick? They ain’t had no trouble there? Say London got terrorist, oui?
We were in hill and brush country now, with oil rigs grazing like skeletal dinosaurs and cattle huddled in the umbrella shade of oaks.
“Nobody think you terrorist?”
“They think I’m beige. Like oatmeal. Like nothing.”
He said, “Nobody ask you?”
“I remember this interview with James Baldwin. One of my favorite writers. He said Greeks and Armen
ians weren’t white until they came to America. They were Greeks and Armenians.”
“You go to Greece, what they think you are?”
“Sometimes in Spain, they think I’m Spanish. France, I’m French. Maybe from Marseille. A couple times in England someone thought I was a Gypsy.” I looked at the blond grass and stubby bushes, the immense flatness of the land.
His eyes were moving constantly over the landscape, too. Not on me. “Black still black. You in Texas now.”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a minute, the indentation like a dimple. “You make it up when you in college, no?”
“Yes.”
“You lie?”
I nodded. “All the time.”
He nodded, too, just slightly, the way he always did. That incline of the chin. “I make myself up. In the Army. Gustave, too. We ain’t had no paper. The name in the Bible, and the Bible wash away. No birth paper, rien. Man take us off the levee, blankitte, and keep us at his house for a month. Then he take us down to Azure, and he gone. When we turn eighteen, we get somebody make us a paper.” He opened the bag of pistachios we’d bought at the gas station. “Army don’t care, back in ’42. Take who come.”
I held out my hand and he put a few pistachios on my palm. The salt flooded my mouth. “What’s the best thing you ever ate?”
“Only one?”
“No.”
“Cochon. On the levee.”
He had to have imagined the meat. He was four. What did I remember from being four? “What else?”
“They had walnut tree in France. In the war. By the farmhouse. Them walnut cold and they taste good. I sit there, and think of the pecan tree down in Azure. By the graveyard. Me and Gustave find some pecan once at night. We tro faim. We bout ten, t’etre. Put them pecan on the fire little bit.” He held the pink pistachio shells like treasure in his hand.
“Glorette and I found pecans like that in the yard. Baked by the sun. Fat and sweet.”
He nodded. “Call that nut meat. Pas meat. A seed.” He paused. “Sit there all night, watch for German come, and eat them walnut. Think I ever see Gustave again.” He looked out the window, and then said, “Eat some cuite, when I come back from the war. And drink some water from a well, real cold once. And one time your maman make a gumbo. A party. I don’t know why. Best gumbo I ever eat.”
“The best thing I ever drank was black cherry Kool-Aid. It was so hot, that summer. And Glorette and I drank it in glasses with ice.”
Then I thought of Victor. Drinking the gangster Kool-Aid.
He said he wanted to be a combination of Zelman and Marcus, a crazy lovely hybrid. A teacher. I reached for my CDs and put in Bob Marley. “No Woman, No Cry.”
The first time I heard the song, when I was in college, I saw it all so clearly, as if I had been there—the government yard in Trenchtown, the firelight, the porridge. My feet is my only carriage.
Because I had been there, with Marcus, back when we sat in the beds of two trucks pulled together in the river bottom. Lafayette’s boom box playing Earth, Wind and Fire. Bored, broke, playing cards, built a fire, and what we had to eat was tortillas. A whole stack that Glorette and I heated up on an old refrigerator rack. They were so warm and soft—like eating the moon. I sat in the circle of Marcus’s arm, and I licked the side of his neck, in the dark. The tortilla, the salt, and the warmth.
I drove for hours. My father drifted in and out of sleep, the seat leaned back.
I remembered how he always slept in the big chair in the living room, sometimes until midnight when the boys finally came home after a football game. I crept out to watch him once, and when I woke him, we sat in the dark together, waiting for my brothers. We looked out the picture window at the garden, the road below. My father said, “Dor bien in the chair. My grandmère do that. Say her maman do that, too. Moinette. Moinette say her maman sleep in the chair. The maman from Africa. Say, sleep in the bed danger. Make you too rest. Say, keep watch.”
“For coyotes?”
“Watch for somebody steal Moinette. But she don’t steal. She sell in the night.”
Was Victor sleeping in the Navigator, curled in the back, Alfonso with his mouth a little open in the passenger seat, and Jazen driving and driving, like me? Had they pulled off on the road, in the shade of a tree, and napped? Like the men in The Encampment?
We were all bamboccianti now.
I thought of the next few months. Fall travel—usually cruises and cheaper European trips. The Dalmatian coast. Leaves and festivals. Pumpkins and apples and pecans. Not pecans from a wild tree in a field. Then Christmas season, though usually those pics had to be done the year before—like Paris, the City of Light at the holidays, snow on the bridges. New York decorated. Santa Fe shrouded in white.
My life was absolutely predictable. The Romance of Rome. The Hidden Amalfi Coast. The Art of Country Pub Food. Secret Venice. Belize—the Tamed Jungle.
But I’d never been to New Orleans.
So I left Los Feliz—the Happy Place—to find Victor, who’d watched someone from Boyle Heights get shot by a guy from the Westside of Rio Seco, where all the blacks were forced to live when they came from Louisiana and Oklahoma and Mississippi. And I was headed to New Orleans, where south of the city was Azure, a place named for a white girl’s eyes.
The sun was low behind us by seven o’clock. My father woke up changed again, just after I passed over the Llano River.
“We can eat in San Antonio,” I told my father. “About an hour.”
He shook his head. “Stop at dark.”
“We haven’t heard from Victor, and who knows whether they’ll even find the mysterious Albert. We have to catch up with them.”
He shook his head again, just a few inches, like an irritating totem pole god, sitting stiff and staring straight ahead.
“It’s cooler at night. People always say it’s better on the car.”
“Not on the people.”
“Papa. I fly and drive all over the world. I’ve driven all night so many times—I drove through the Alps in Austria once when a hundred cars got stuck by an avalanche, and we had to stay awake so we could move forward.”
“Who you with?”
“What?”
“You with your friend. Tony.”
“Yeah. So? He’s not scared of much, but—”
He cut me off. “Now you with me. You just a nigger.”
“Papa.”
“We get stop at some gas station, some fool see us and want play—you ain’t nobody.” His voice sounded like some movie. Echoing and deep. “You not a writer. You with me. You tite souri. For them. They work in the day. At night they got nothin to do. Drink beer and look for souri.”
A mouse.
“When you brought me and Glorette, did we drive all night?”
“Non. We stop in Seguin. Somebody farm pecan. But she gone now.” Then he cracked a pistachio.
We came into the suburbs around San Antonio. “Up there, by Tyler, a man tell me his grandpère born when they cut open the maman belly. Hang her from a tree. She cuss some blankitte.”
Texas.
“Name that baby Boston. I meet him in France. Boston, c’est bien place.”
We crossed the Guadalupe River. The sun was nearly gone now, but no moon rose in the windshield. It would come up late. Half-eaten.
My father said, “Fantine. La-bas.” He pointed to the big Super 8 sign just outside Seguin.
Inside, the young man at the counter said, “Sorry, we’re totally full. Which way you headed?”
“East,” I said, over the television blaring in the lounge.
“There’s the Check Inn,” he said. “In Weimar.”
When I opened the car door, the air pulled out a rush of vaguely sweet cigar smoke and salt. The duffel bag was on the floor behind my seat now, zipped again, but he had moved it. “Another hour,” I said. “No choice. You want to stop and eat first?”
My father shook his head.
Down the narrow lit pa
th of freeway, surrounded by darkness, by woods and farms and empty night to a town that sounded as if it should feature a castle. Sure as hell couldn’t write this one. My father gets psychotically paranoid the minute the sun drops. Let’s do a piece on sundown towns. Nigger, don’t let the sun set on you in Hawthorne—I’d seen pictures of the old sign just outside LA.
Nothing but that weird blue-black everywhere, the trees like cutouts against velvet, only the high-mounted lights of a few ranches like electrified eagle nests in the distance. I was spooked, too. Spook. Haint. Spirit. The bright people—what Aunt Almoinette used to call them—ghosts of white people who walked along the levee at night.
But I knew better than to say anything about ghosts. It was live people he was afraid of. What if we did get pulled over right now, by a Texas cop? What would my father do? We were actually going to a town called Weimar? Like Nazis instead of Klan?
The sign beckoned like a giant spatula from the side of the freeway—CZECH INN. No way.
It must have been a former Super 8, with exactly the same architecture. Parking lot half-full, and dark except for the brightly lit portico and pillars—a very sad castle. The woman behind the desk said, “We’ve only got three rooms left. Two queen beds.”
That was us.
She was about fifty-five, with brown hair in a very short pageboy, and one of those measured, toneless voices. Her face was perfectly still when she took my driver’s license and credit card. “Los Angeles,” she said. “You’re driving a long way by yourself.”
“My father’s with me,” I said, and then she looked up, over her glasses, like a clichéd librarian.
“Isn’t that nice?” she said, and her whole face lit up. I wasn’t an LA jerk with a white shirt and platinum Visa and attitude. I was with my dad. I was okay.
I sat on the queen bed closest to the window. Satiny comforters. Metallic smell of air-conditioning and bathroom cleanser. Carpet worn by thousands of feet.
“You think they’re already in New Orleans?” I asked.
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