Here’s what I think in higher flights of fancy. Once there existed beings, a race, a species (call it what you will) who truly belonged to this world. Then at some point, for whatever reason, they moved on, and
we
moved into their places. We go on trying to occupy those places, day after endless day. But we’ll always remain strangers here, all of us. And for all our efforts, whatever dissimulations we attempt, we’ll never quite fit.
L
IGHTS
CAME
UP
BEHIND
ME
NOT
too far outside Greenville —for all I know, the two young men who’d been enjoying their roast beef specials at The Finer Diner.
They, the lights, winked into being far back in my mirror, pinned in the distance at first, believably neons or traffic lights, or one of those blinking roadside barriers. But then they rushed in to close the gap, like something falling out of the sky, and suddenly were there behind me, filling mirror and road.
I pulled over and watched the one in shotgun position climb out and make his careful, by-the-book way toward me. Once years ago I’d made the mistake of stepping out of my car to meet a state policeman halfway and found myself suddenly face-down on the asphalt shoulder with a knee in my back. So now I sat very still, not even reaching for my wallet, watching him come toward me in the rearview, walk out of it, reappear in the wing mirror, then at the window.
He had to be midtwenties at least but looked all of sixteen, with a close-trimmed mustache, discount-store mirror shades, black goat-ropers. Coming abreast and bending down, he removed the glasses in a quick left-to-right sweep, releasing startling green eyes.
“License and registration, sir? Proof of insurance?”
I probably imagined the slight pause and emphasis on
sir.
I reached slowly into the glove compartment for the car’s papers, handed him those (in a leatherette wallet) along with my license and rental agreement. He studied them all carefully, looking from the picture on my license up to me and down again. Walked behind the car to check plates against the numbers listed.
“Would you excuse me for a moment, Mr. Griffin?”
He went back to the squad and passed documents across the sill. Waited. Exchanged a few words, straightened, came back toward me: rearview, side mirror, window.
“We apologize for holding you up, sir. You know a Lieutenant Walsh? NOPD?”
I nodded.
“He says thanks. Called headquarters here and asked us to stop you and tell you that. Said you’d be coming through in a Sears rental, gave us the plate number. Said just to tell you thanks, he wouldn’t forget it—you’d know what he meant.”
I smiled. Years ago when things were at their worst, Don was the one who stuck by me. First he, then Vicky, had made it possible for me to go on, helped me find long-lost Lew in brambles of remorse and inaction.
And Verne. How much of what I’ve become owes to Verne? I was never able to tell her what she meant to me; never really knew, until it was too late. And yet, somehow in all those years we circled and closed on one another like binary stars, all those departures and partial returns, somehow, in some indefinable manner, we had held one another up, had been able to climb together (even when apart) out of the wastes of our pasts.
How could I not have known that?
“Mr. Griffin?”
“Sorry. A sudden attack of memory.”
“Right.” He looked at me curiously. “Lieutenant Walsh also said we were to tell you to call if you need him. For anything, he said—anything at all.”
I nodded, thanked him again.
“Drive safely, Mr. Griffin.”
He tipped a brief salute against his hat brim and headed back to his squad.
An hour and spare change later I stood in my newly rented cabin at the Magnolia Branch Motel drinking the cream of a newly cracked fifth of Teacher’s from one of those squat tumblers you never see anywhere else. I’d even had to unwrap the glass, like a Christmas gift, from crinkly, twisted paper. There was a strip of paper across the toilet seat. Rubber flower appliqués on the floor of the tub. The bed was equipped with Magic Fingers, but two quarters didn’t persuade them to do anything.
Missagoula, Mississippi, was like a hundred other towns scattered through the South. The interstate zipped by only a few miles away but may as well have been in China. Remnants of an old town square hosted two gas stations (one of which doubled as post office), a café and steakhouse, a combined town library and meeting hall, a doughnut shop, a junk store or two, and an insurance office. For two or three blocks around that hub there were a scatter of paint and hardware stores, utility companies, used-clothing or -furniture shops. Then everything opened back up to farmland, trees and sky. I’d counted four churches, so far.
The Magnolia Branch squatted at the border of town and not-town. I can’t imagine who would ever stay there, in a town like that, but rates were cheap and rooms immaculate. They still weren’t very used to having blacks drop in, I’d guess. My request for a room occasioned considerable discussion behind the wall before the clerk (and owner, as I’d later discover) returned to push across a key and take two nights in advance. I asked about the possibility of getting a drink and was told I could get beer down at the café but if I wanted anything else I’d have to go over to Nathan’s.
Nathan’s turned out to be the gas station that didn’t double as post office. I dropped off luggage at cabin six, walked back into town and, saying I understood liquor was for sale here, got ushered into a shed out back of the station. Bottles were set out on cheap steel shelving before which the attendant hovered impatiently. I pointed to the Teacher’s and paid him. He followed me out, locked the door carefully behind us.
So now I stood there in my Magnolia Branch Motel doorway lapping at the first few most welcome sips of scotch and looking away (Dixieland!) into dusty Delta distances. News unrolled on the TV behind me. A coup attempt somewhere in Latin America, Philadelphia man’s citizen’s award revoked when it was discovered the recipient routinely molested the adolescents his Care House harbored, Housing Authority of New Orleans under investigation by feds.
Immediately upon returning to the motel I’d phoned Clare. Her recording had come on, and I’d started telling her where I was, how she could reach me. I’d got as far as the Missagoula part when she picked up.
“I’m here, Lew.
Where
did you say you were?”
I spelled it for her. I may even have got it right.
“And the girl’s supposed to be there?”
“She gave it as an address at the hospital, finally, Richard said. Claimed she lived here with a relative. I’m pulling out in just a minute to try and find the place.”
“Good luck, then.”
“Thanks. I’ll call again tomorrow.”
“Lucky, lucky me!”
I finished my drink, rinsed the glass and put it face-down on a towel. I’d just pulled the door shut behind me when the phone started ringing. I unlocked the door and went back in.
“Lew,” Clare said, “remember when you said that about another man?”
“What?”
“You were talking about my cat. Joking that there was a new man in my life.”
“Oh, right.”
“Well, there is.”
“There is what?”
“A new man in my life.”
I didn’t say anything, and after a while she said, “You there, Lew?”
“I’m here.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you. I kept waiting for the right time, and it never came. Then you left, and the more I thought about it, the worse I felt. After I hung up just now, I knew I had to tell you, that I couldn’t wait anymore.”
“It’s all right, Clare.”
“It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t really care about you. I do, you know. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know I don’t want to lose you.”
We both fell silent, listening together to choruses of ghostlike voices far back in the wires, at the very edge of intelligibility.
“Oh Lew, are we going to be able to do this?”
“We’ve both been through a lot worse.”
“Indeed we have, sailor. Indeed we have.”
Silent again for a moment, we listened, but the voices, too, now were silent. Listening to
us,
perhaps.
“You’ll call and let me know how it’s going?”
“I will.” Though as it turned out, I didn’t.
“Bye, Lew. Love you.”
And she was gone.
I
STOPPED
AT
N
ATHAN’S
TO
ASK
directions and, following a consultation between the surly black man chewing on cold pizza behind the counter and a mechanic with grease worked into the lines of his face so profoundly that it looked like some primitive mask, headed out of town away from the interstate, leaving pavement behind after a few miles, tires clawing for safe ground among gullylike ruts, the little Mazda sashaying and hip-heavy.
Houses were infrequent and set back off the road, simple wood structures built a foot or two off the ground, most of them long unpainted and patched with odd scraps of lumber, corrugated tin, tar paper, heavy cardboard. Many had cluttered front porches and neatly laid-out vegetable gardens alongside. Small stands of trees surrounded house and yard; beyond that, flat farmland unrolled to every side.
I pulled in, as I’d been told back at Nathan’s, by a yellowish house on the right, first one I came to after crossing railroad tracks and going through two crossroads. An old woman in a faded sundress scattered grain for chickens at the side of the house. She was oddly colorless, pulpy like wood long left outdoors, collapsing into herself with the years. She looked at me with all the interest a tree stump might display.
“Hello, m’am. Sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for Alouette.”
Nothing showed on her face. “Not bothering me,” she said. Then she turned and walked away, to a rough shed nailed onto the back of the house at one end, open at the other. I followed a few steps behind. She dumped grain back into a burlap bag and folded the top over. Hung the pail from a nail just above.
“Could you tell me if she’s around?”
“Have to ask what your business with her might be.”
“I promised a friend I’d look her up.”
She grunted. It was more like the creak of a gate than any grunt I’d ever heard. “Name’s Adams. Where you from, boy?”
“New Orleans.”
“Mmm. Thought so.” She looked to see how the chickens were doing. They seemed more interested in pecking one another than the food. “I was up to Memphis once. You been there?”
“Yes m’am, I have.” Memphis was where my father died, though I wasn’t there then.
“You care much for it?”
“Not particularly. It’s like just about any other town you see around here, only a lot bigger.”
She groaned—it couldn’t have been a laugh—and said that was God’s truth. Then she looked at me for a while before saying: “Well then, I guess I know who you must be. That Griffin fellow LaVerne took up with. Don’t much like you, from what I know. Don’t expect me to.”
“You knew LaVerne, then?”
Again that long, affectless regard.
“Mother gen’rally knows her only daughter.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Adams,” I said shortly. “I didn’t know. I had no idea Verne’s parents were still alive.”
“Just the one. But neither did she, boy, that you’d notice. Not that her daddy and I ever wanted things any different, you understand. Vernie had her life down there in New Orleans, and she was welcome to it, but
we
didn’t want any part of it. Wrote once or twice.”
“LaVerne really turned things around, later on. She helped a lot of other people get their lives together, too. You both could have put all that behind you.”
“Maybe we could have. Maybe not.” She eyed the chickens again, looked up at the sky. Darkness had begun working its way in at day’s edge. “Things had changed here too.”
“So Alouette came here because you’re her grandmother?”
“You have the kind of troubles that girl had, you just naturally go to a woman. From what I know about down there where you-all are, there wasn’t much of anybody she
could
go to.”
“Her mother was trying to get in touch with her, before she died. That’s why I’m here now.”
“Girl didn’t know that. Didn’t say much about her mother ever: Not that I cared to listen.”
“How did Alouette find you here? Or even know about you, for that matter?”
“Long time ago, right after Vernie had her, I sent that girl a book of stories I came across in the back of a cabinet, something that was Vernie’s when she was little. Thought she might make some use of it. Envelope had the address, and she says her mother cut that out and pasted it in the front of the book. Never sent another thing to that girl. But I ain’t moved, of course. And she still had it.”
“Where’s Alouette now, Mrs. Adams?”
“Couldn’t tell you that, I’m afraid.”
“But she is here? With you?”
Her eyes were as lifeless as locust husks abandoned on a tree. “Stayed here a few days. Then when it looked to be some trouble, I had Mr. Simpson drive that girl over to the Clarksville hospital. I did midwifing back in the old times. You don’t forget what birthing trouble looks like.”
“Did you visit her at the hospital? Did anyone?”
“Haven’t seen her since the day Mr. Simpson came by to get her.”
“Didn’t you wonder how she was doing? Think she might need you?”
“Don’t waste much time worrying and thinking. I figure the girl found me once. If she wants to, she can do it again. She’d be welcome enough.”
“You know about her baby?”
“Mr. Simpson told me it’s still alive.”
“Mrs. Adams, I have to ask you something. Please don’t take this wrong. Was your granddaughter using drugs when she was here?”
She thought for a moment. “Wouldn’t know how to tell you. She wasn’t normal. Laid around half asleep most of the time, didn’t have any appetite. All that could be what was going wrong inside her.”
“You don’t have any idea where she might have gone, then, after leaving the hospital?”