Beth Ann: “Life could be worthwhile without Terri, I know that. There would be reasons to go on living. I would find them. But right now I can’t imagine what they might be.”
Teresa: “Coming here, to the States to live—for a single year, I thought then—I felt as Columbus must have felt. I was falling off the edge of the world, leaving civilization behind me. Then I discovered malls! fast food! credit cards!”
Me: “Once in the sixties I remember seeing spray-painted on the wall of a K&B: Convenience Kills.”
Teresa: “ ‘For arrogance and hatred are the wares peddled in the thoroughfares.’ ”
B.A.: “Yeats.”
Me: “ ‘A Poem for My Daughter.’ Now
I’m
the fifty-year-old, unsmiling, unpublic man.”
“I think we need to give some thought to food,” Teresa said. “Food seems essential.”
“I think we’re all still waiting for that conductor,” Beth Ann said.
T
HE
SUN
WAS
EDGING
UP
BY
THE
TIME
we climbed into Teresa’s car to head for a restaurant out on the loop. I sat between her and Beth Ann in the front seat. Morning light filled our conversation, too; shadows fell away. When they dropped me back at the motel an hour or so later, after two pecan waffles and a gallon of coffee, I’d begun filling slowly with light myself.
I showered, put on real clothes (Verne called them “grown-up clothes,” I suddenly remembered) and went to the hospital to see what I needed to do. Day Administrator Katherine Farrell, a woman in her late fifties and more handsome than pretty, striking nonetheless, expressed her condolences and said that Mrs. Adams had already signed the necessary papers.
I found her sitting in the covered bus stop outside the hospital. I sat down beside her. We watched traffic go by.
“Ain’t the first or the last time either of us lost something,” she said after a while.
“No, m’am.”
A workhorse of an old Ford pickup, fenders ripped away, heaved past, wearing the latest of several coats of primer. A beetle-green new Toyota followed close behind. Rap’s heavy iambs, its booming bass, washed over us.
“I want you to know I’ve been talking to those nurses in there. They tell me you loved that little girl, that you’re a good man. And judging from what you said on the way here, my daughter turned out a fair good woman.”
“Yes, m’am. She did. She always was.”
“Been wrong before.”
“Yes, m’am.” Then, after a moment, nothing more forthcoming: “Thank you.”
I stood. “My car’s in the lot, Mrs. Adams. I’ll drive you back home now, if you’re ready.”
She put her hand out and I took it. It was like holding on to dry twigs.
“I’d appreciate that, Lewis,” she said.
I was back in Clarksville by midafternoon and, after a quick meal at a place called The Drop, stretched out at the motel for a few hours’ sleep. I’d got almost half of one of those hours when the phone rang.
I struggled to the surface and said, “Yeah?”
“Sorry about the kid. I know how that feels, and that nothing I can say’s going to help. You know who this is, right?”
I nodded, then came a little more awake and said, “Camaro.” The world was swimming into focus, albeit soft.
“You okay, man?”
“Fine. Just haven’t managed much sleep this last couple of days.”
“Know how that is, too. I can call back.”
“No reason to. What’s up?”
“Well …” It rolled on out for half a minute or so. “Probably shouldn’t be calling you at all. Last time I did, from what I hear, you went apeshit and ralphed those boys right into the hospital. You ever hear of asking a guy first?”
“I asked.”
“Oh yeah? Remember to say please?”
“I’m sure I did. Rarely forget that. I may have left off the thank you, though, now that I think about it.”
“Ever had your jaw wired, Griffin?”
“Came close a few times.”
“I bet you did. Probably chew the wires up and spit them at people. Well, what the fuck, those boys are pretty much garbage anyway. You don’t take them out to the curb, someone else will.”
“So: you called up to give me a few hot tips on navigating the complex social waters of postcolonial Mississippi. Or just to chat, for old times’ sake? Not that we share any old times.”
“We all know you’re
bad
by now, Griffin.”
“Yeah, well, I need sleep more than I need bullshit right now.”
“You also need help finding your girl. Though damn if
I
know why anyone’d want to help you.”
“It’s my honest face. My purity of heart. My high position in antebellum society. And the twenties I spread around. What do you have?”
“Thought you always remembered to say please.”
“Please.”
“There’s a girl, Louette, that’s been kind of living at this dealer’s house just over the state line. I mean, they finally took a look around and realized she’s been there at least a month. Helping out at first you know, doing the guys when they were able or whatever, but since then just hunkering down there, riding a big free one. Even
they
know that’s not good business.”
“Thank you.”
I wrote down the address he gave me.
“One thing,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Try to keep from going nuclear on this one? You’re not in the big city now. We try to keep a lower profile out here, not draw too much attention to ourselves.”
I told him I’d do what I could. Neither of us believed it.
The house was up in West Memphis, on the outskirts, in a part of town owing its existence to the spillover from Memphis military bases during World War II, a warren of apartment-size simple wood homes set close in row after row like carrots in a garden. Narrow, bobtail driveways had eroded through the years, cowlicks of grass and hedge pushing through them; many of the carports had become extra rooms, utility sheds, screened-in porches; trailers were grafted onto some. Abandoned refrigerators, motorcycles and decaying cars sat in yards beside swing sets and inflatable pools.
I pulled to the curb at 3216 Zachary Taylor. Out my side window in the distance I could see the wing-like curve of the Arkansas-Mississippi Bridge. I’d had to drive on into Memphis, drop onto Riverfront Drive, and loop back across the bridge into Arkansas. I started up the brief walk, hearing what sounded like reggae country music from inside. Marley in Nashville, maybe. Jimmy Cliff and His Country Shitkickers.
Remembering Camaro’s admonitions, I knocked politely at the door. No one responded, so I knocked, politely, again. Then, with still no response, as politely as possible I started kicking.
The door opened and a man maybe half my age stood there. Brush-style blond hair, fatigue pants with a white Hanes T, lizard cowboy boots. Pumper muscles and an earring. Tumbler in hand. Tequila, from the smell of it.
“What is your
problem
?”
Behind him, from different rooms, both Randy Travis and reggae were playing at high volume, crashing onto one another’s beach, from time to time blending in an oddly beautiful way.
“Oh. Sorry. Didn’t think you’d heard me.”
“We heard you. They heard you over in Little Rock, man.”
“Good. It’s so hard to be heard in this world. Thank you.”
“Mama brought you up right, did she? Manners like that, I’d think you couldn’t be anything but one of those biblebeaters that come through here every week or so. They’re always wearing a coat and tie, too. Don’t nobody
else
‘round here.”
He took a sip of his drink.
“But of course you ain’t no biblebeater, are you?”
“No sir, I have to tell you I’m not. But I do wonder if you might do me the favor of answering a question or two. I won’t trouble you to take much of your time.”
“And why would I answer any questions you’d have? Unless you have a warrant, that is.”
“Warrant?”
“Come on, you got cop on you like slime on a snail.”
Another, shorter man with a close-cut helmet of hair, vaguely elfish, had joined him at the door. Squinting beneath monumental eyebrows he said, “Yeah, man, this the
new
South. Nigger cops ever’where.”
“You go on back inside now, Bobo. We’re doing just fine out here.”
“So that’s the way it is here in America. What made us great,” he said to me. “You come back with a warrant, or the next time it’s clear trespass. You hear what I’m saying?”
Uh-oh. This guy watched cop shows; I was in trouble.
He shut the door.
When it stopped against my foot, he glanced down.
Then he looked back up at me and, for a split second before he caught himself, over my shoulder.
It was enough.
I went down, rolling, as the guy behind me swung and, meeting no resistance, connected with Mr. Warrant midchest, a glancing blow, then toppled himself.
I pivoted back like a break dancer and slammed my feet into Warrant’s kidneys. His glass bounced off the front wall and rebounded, spinning, into the small entryway, came up against vinyl coping and stopped there, rocking back and forth. I hooked fingers into his neck now that he was down. Put a heel hard against the other one’s balls and felt him curl in on himself.
“Your call,” I told him. “Funny how so much of life comes down to attitude, huh?”
“Hold on, man,” he said. “We can talk about this.” And the minute I started backing off his windpipe and carotid: “
Bobby Ray
!”
Who trotted in from a room to the right where the face of some talk-show host filled a TV screen like an egg in a bottle, nailing live audience and viewers with sincere clear eyes.
Bobby Ray had a sincere Walther PPK in one hand.
I had a coat rack.
It caught him full across neck and chest. Remember Martin Balsam pedaling backward down the stairs in
Psycho
?
His head came up off the floor like a turtle’s, trying for air. Didn’t get it. The head went back down. He was still.
I set the coat rack back down in the corner. A few well-anchored coats swung to a stop on its hooks; most were on the floor.
“You have a right not to move,” I told Mr. Warrant. “You get up and I use you to clean furniture. You hear what I’m saying?”
He nodded.
I picked up the PPK and walked into the next room. Faces turned toward me. Petals on a wet black bough. A modest buffet of drugs was set out on a card table: joints, bowls of colored pills, a couple of small covered plastic containers, a marble cheese board with razor and some remains of white powder on it.
Feeding time at the zoo.
“Our savior.”
“Ecce homo.
And I do mean mo’.”
“Show-and-tell time, obviously.”
“Black’s definitely beautiful.”
“Validate your parking ticket, sir?”
“Pizza dude’s here.”
“Help.”
Alouette said nothing.
I found her in the back bedroom, lying on two stacked mattresses, nude, between a skinny black man and a fat 44-D blonde. They were passing a fifth of Southern Comfort back and forth over her. The
Green Acres
theme erupted from a bedside TV.
I dug into the hollow of her neck. There was a pulse, albeit a weak one.
“Where’s the phone?”
He looked at me and, without looking away, handed the bottle across to the blonde. She grappled and found it, hauled it in, breast swinging.
In one continuous move I took it from her and smashed it against the headboard. Held a most satisfying handle and bladelike shard of glass against the man’s throat as I watched his hard-on dwindle to nothing, with the impossibly sweet reek of oranges washing over us.
“
Now
,” I said.
His eyes swept toward the floor. Again, again. I reached under the bed and pulled out the phone. Dialed 911.
“Thirty-two sixteen Zachary Taylor,” I said. Overdose, I was going to say, but heard instead: “Officer down.” There’d be hell to pay. But the ambulance was there in four minutes.
While we were waiting, new muscle came into the room. Three of them.
“That’s the guy did Lonnie,” one of them said. “Busted his jaw.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Oyster time.”
I lifted the PPK.
We were still facing one another off when the ambulance and four police cars careened into place.
T
IME
TO
REMEMBER
LOTS
OF
PRISON
FILMS.
Lisping Tony Curtis chained to a black stud, spoon handles ground down to knives against cement floors, lights dimming all over town as Big Lou got fried moments before the stay of execution came, college students on summer vacation in the South pulled over by big-bellied cops and railroaded onto chain gangs. And the novels: Malcolm Braly’s
On the Yard
, Chester Himes’s
Cast the First Stone
.
On the way in, in the squad car, one of the cops asked me what the hell I thought I was doing.
A good question.
A
very
good question for this fifty-year-old, unsmiling, resolutely unpublic man.
What
was
I doing?
Besides sitting in a holding cell in West Memphis, Arkansas, that is—home at last, or close enough.
Besides not telling mostly indifferent juniors, seniors and a scatter of grad students about modern French novels—which is what I was
supposed
to be doing.
The thought occurred to me that I’d disappeared from my school as precipitately and incommunicably as, a few years ago, my son David had vanished from his.
I really
was
getting far too old for this.
And besides, basically the whole thing just wasn’t any of my business.
And so I sat there, watching dawn lightly brush, then nudge, then fill a single high window, drinking cup after cup of coffee deputies brought me and declining their offer of cigarettes, my mind curving gently inward, backward, toward things long shut away.
David: his final postcard and consummate disappearance, those moments of silence on the phone machine’s tape.
Vicky: red hair drifting in a cloud above me, pale white body opening beneath me, trilled
r
’s, unvoiced assents,
I can’t do this any longer Lew
. Seeing her off and for the last time at the airport as she emplaned for Paris.