Something Rising (Light and Swift) (26 page)

“I'll have another cappuccino.”

“I'll have another black coffee as well.”

“Me, too.”

Themis took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Je-
sus
.”

Bode took a cigarette out of his breast pocket and tapped the filter on the counter, settling the tobacco down in the paper. “All this talk about my machine puts me in mind of the end of the world. What would you like to be doing at the end of the world, son?”

Thomas squinted at the ceiling. “You'll have to give me some time to think about it.”

“I myself hope to be either fornicating or defecating. You heard right. There's a lot I'd like to
get out.”

Thomas turned and studied Bode hard, leaving Cassie to look at the back of his head. Bode stared straight ahead, smoking.

“I personally believe people should keep much more in,” Thomas said.

Bode nodded. “Where are you from again? Kansas?”

“Indiana.”

Cassie didn't say anything. She could meet someone from Indiana—that long, skinny state—anywhere in the world.

“You're probably repressed,” Bode said, blowing on his fresh cappuccino.

“Probably so.”

In Cassie's drawing the 2-ball was only six inches dead center from a corner pocket, but the cue was behind the 5; the one thing for it was a massé shot, showy and not her strength.

Bode blew a stream of blue smoke, then stubbed out his cigarette. “I've met a couple people from Indiana. They were all deeply troubled but appeared to be normal. Does that describe the situation from your point of view?”

Thomas nodded.

“Another thing I noticed about you Indianaians—”

“Hoosiers.”

“Hoosiers, is that once you're removed from your home state, you miss it something fierce. I find that curious, given the facts about Indiana.”

“What are the facts about Indiana? Thank you, Themis.”

Bode took a sip of coffee. “Flat. Ugly. Stupid. Reactionary. I could think of some more if I put my mind to it.”

“Where'd you grow up, Bode?”

“Natchez. A soporific. My heart's desire.”

“Tell me three things you remember about growing up there. Just pictures, not feelings.”

“Three things. Sure. I … hmmmm. Let's see. I remember running
through cold sheets that had been hung on the line in the backyard. My granny'd hung them, they smelled burnt with bleach. I remember playing in a wrecked-out 1954 Nash Rambler that was abandoned in the woods behind our house. Would have been a great car if somebody had, you know. The seats got
hot
in the summertime. Is that two? Three: I used to pull taffy with my cousin Ruth. She was skinny and a redhead, had those thyroid eyes. She worked me over, son, past distraction.”

“There you go. It doesn't take much, does it, to become homesick. I didn't hear anything about Natchez in your description.”

Bode lit another cigarette. “I fear something is amiss in yer syllogism. You're making a generalized statement about homesickness, Brother Thomas, and I'm asking why all y'all Indianaians miss that place
in particular.”

Thomas drew a pattern in the sweat from his untouched water glass, a circle next to what looked like the Washington Monument, and Cassie copied it into her notebook. It was familiar.

“I don't know,” Thomas said. “It's hard to pinpoint. Maybe I'll write it down for you.”

“Ahh.” Bode stubbed out this cigarette. “You'll never do it, you coward.” He stood up, stretched, sorted money from the pile of paper on the counter, and pushed Cassie's pen back toward her.

“What am I afraid of, do you think?” Thomas asked.

Bode gathered up his Post-its, his business cards. “You're afraid to admit what you miss most about that godforsaken place. Basketball. It's basketball, ain't it.”

Thomas laughed, a big laugh that earned a glare from Themis. “That's it; you've figured me out.”

Bode bowed to them. “Have a good Good Friday. Remember the man who died for your sins. Thomas, don't be a stranger.”

Cassie studied the drawing of the ball and spire, saw it cast in amber on a black base, left behind by Jimmy. For years it had been on the bookcase in the dim living room, separating Belle's favorite novels from Laura's, and then it had vanished.

“It's the trylon and perisphere,” Thomas said, glancing at her notebook. “From the 1939 World's Fair.”

“Yes.” Cassie nodded. “I remember now.” She looked up at him; he was looking back.

The night before she had dreamed she was standing in a clearing in a forest with a fat woman she should have recognized. The woman wore a cape and thick glasses and was carrying a crooked stick. Something about the woman struck Cassie as whimsical and humorous, even as she bred a dense wariness; Cassie backed away from the scene so vigorously that she bumped flat against the wall of the dream, a scrim as dense as brick. First the woman was tatting a black lace shawl but leaving holes, accidental gaps, crazed as the web of a terminally ill spider. And then the shawl was gone, and she was pointing the stick at a hawk, an old teacup, a tombstone, and saying,
Me, me, me
. It was a matter of time. Cassie woke up in a sweat.

“… except for the college kids, who consider it a rite of passage to vomit in the street in front of a crowd,” Thomas was saying. His truck had been a block away, sitting in direct sun. The temperature was in the mid-seventies and the humidity low, but when Thomas unlocked the passenger door, a blast of heat from inside the truck hit her like a wave. It was an old Chevy half-ton, dark blue with a black vinyl interior.

“It gets hot,” Thomas said, unlocking his door.

“What's it like in the summer?” Cassie asked, sliding in.

“Oh, Lord. Every day here, in the summer, is a crisis. I don't know why I stay. Some days are so humid you can close your hand around the air, like this”—he made a fist—“and gather water. This truck is rusty and riddled with salt from living on the Gulf. I probably have a pound of sand in my lungs.”

The smell of the interior was immediately recognizable: age, plaster dust, the sharp iron smell of tools, a man's body day after day. The dashboard was gray with dirt. The truck started with a rumble, and they both rolled down their windows and opened the wings. At a stoplight Cassie said, “I think Bode was wrong about Indiana.”

Thomas glanced at her. “You've been there?”

“I live there, actually.”

“Is that right. Whereabouts?”

“A town called Roseville, in Hopwood County.”

Thomas shifted, looked in the rearview mirror. “Never heard of it. A nice place?”

“Some like it. Where are you from?”

“Way down in southern Indiana, near the Kentucky line.”

“What's it close to? Corydon? Tell City? Evansville?”

“Close to Mount Vernon. A town called Wellsboro.”

Cassie closed her eyes, picturing a map. She couldn't see Wellsboro.

Thomas got on to Highway 10, headed north toward 90, the Gulf Coast Highway. The wind and road noise made conversation difficult. Thomas drove easily, the way Jimmy had, steering with his left hand, his right resting on the gearshift. The sunlight and caffeine worked on Cassie, making her both sleepy and jittery. She looked out the window at the passing scenery, which was flat,
swampy, moss hanging from the trees. The truck hummed. If she'd made the trip with Laura, Cassie never would have met Thomas, she wouldn't be in this truck; everything from this point forward in her life would have been different, but Cassie wouldn't have known it, because the days would have felt the same. An oddity. Her thoughts felt like weightless things dipped in something heavier; she couldn't precisely pull them out. She could see her mother as if in a home movie, much younger, pushing Belle on a swing set. Belle's hair, blonder then, sailed out behind her as she flew up in the air, then gathered around her face as she approached the ground. Laura stood still, squinting into the sun and compelling the swing; her motions seemed mechanical, her mind elsewhere. Cassie tried to see herself—was she standing, was she playing?—and then she was falling, she could see her hands outstretched to break her fall.

“Whoa,” she said, sitting up.

“All right?” Thomas said, touching her arm. “You jumped.”

“I fell.” They were in a different place than when she closed her eyes, a two-lane highway running next to the Gulf, fogged in. The water was out there, on Cassie's right, but she couldn't quite see it, and buildings emerged from the fog then vanished again. Thomas had rolled his window most of the way up, and Cassie did the same, feeling chilled. “Where are we?”

“Between Pass Christian and Gulfport. You missed Bay St. Louis. We're heading toward the riverboats. You gamble?”

Cassie shook her head. “Not when I'm bound to lose.”

“Good thinking.”

They passed large ugly buildings filled with cheap bathing suits and inflatable sharks; seafood restaurants; beachside motels surrounded by trees thick with Spanish moss. And there were
houses, estates, behind low whitewashed brick walls, side by side with condominiums, next door to small businesses. A jumble.

“Gorgeous houses.”

Thomas nodded. “Those are the ones that survived Camille in sixty-nine. To natives, all time is measured before and after.”

Gulfport had a small college right there on the highway, but Cassie didn't see any students. A live oak in front of the building was so large, and had so many elephantine, twisting branches, that a tree house had been built in it and could be seen from the road.

Cassie turned to look at it as they passed.

“The Friendship Oak, that tree is called. Pre-Columbian. A lot of kissing goes on up there.”

“You would know, I guess.” Cassie gave him a slight smile.

“Not me, no ma'am. I get my information from those far more morally dubious than myself.”

They passed a casino designed to look like a pirate's ship.

“What brings you down south?”

She shrugged. “Curiosity. What about you?”

“The same. And I needed to simplify my life.”

“But you miss home?”

“Off and on. I've been gone a long time. I want you to see something,” Thomas said, turning north on a busy four-lane road. Cassie thought at first that they were in downtown Gulfport, but the town seemed to disappear, replaced by low-slung buildings, one after another. Every other business, it seemed, was a pawnshop; between them were E-Z Cash windows where soldiers from Keesler Air Force Base were getting advances on their pay. There were body shops and strip clubs, but the vast majority of the buildings contained treasure in hock.

“We like to keep things right out in the open on the Gulf. No
messing around with subtlety.” Thomas turned around and drove back to 90, went left. The pawnshops were lined up outside the casino doors, too. “We're almost to Biloxi. You ready for lunch? We could go to Mary Mahoney's, it's a place tourists like to visit, but it's still local. I have breakfast there a lot. Close to my house.”

“Sounds fine.”

“There's another big tree there.”

“Well,” Cassie said, rolling her window down, taking in the fog. “I wouldn't want to miss that.”

They ate lunch in a courtyard surrounded by lacy wrought iron painted white, visited the massive Spanish oak, and went for a walk on the beach. The pale sand stretched the entire thirty miles of Harrison County, Thomas told her, but the water wasn't good for swimming. When she asked what he'd been doing in New Orleans that morning, Thomas said he'd come to find her. “Since it was my day off and all. I mean, I wasn't doing anything else. And what were you doing there, Cassie, if you don't mind my asking?”

She crossed her arms against the Gulf wind. “I went for coffee. It being a coffeehouse.”

“Mm-hmm. It still seems like there's something you're not telling me.”

“There's a lot of that going around.”

They pulled in to the driveway of a lovely house on Reynoir Street, a 1930s cottage. The front porch was wide enough for rocking chairs, a wicker settee, and small wicker side tables.

“This is your house?” Cassie asked, admiring the fresh paint,
the oak door, the polished brass numbers on a post next to the steps.

“No, I live in the gardener's shed behind the house. Miss Sophie lives here, my landlady. We've been together seven years.”

“So she's like family.”

“She is my family,” Thomas said, stepping out of the truck. “We should introduce you.”

The backyard was a model of order against abundance, the flower beds thick with camellias and vines Cassie didn't recognize. They walked onto the screened porch, where there were more rocking chairs, a brass plant stand, and a table on which waited a green pitcher and two metal drinking glasses. As Thomas knocked on the back door, Cassie could smell the inside of the house: lilacs and something earthy, an undertow.

“Miss Sophie?” Thomas called, opening the door.

“I'm in the sitting room, Thomas,” Sophie called. “Don't make me get up.”

They walked through the spotless kitchen with its tall cabinets and hulking gas stove, through the dining room, which appeared to have been unused for years, and into the sunlit front room. Miss Sophie was in her late seventies, Cassie guessed, a big woman in a faded housedress. Her right foot was swollen and propped up on a stool; her white hair was gathered into a knot at her neck.

“Oh,Thomas, you have taken a lover,” she said as Thomas bent down to kiss her, “if I'd known, I'd have baked a cake.” She gestured for Cassie to sit beside her on the rose-colored sofa.

“Miss Sophie, this is Cassie. She's visiting from Indiana.”

“How do you do,” Cassie said, offering her hand.

“My favorite greeting, so old-fashioned.” Miss Sophie pressed Cassie's hand between her own. “I do quite well, except that my circulation is poor and I have to keep this foot propped up. I call what we're sitting on a davenport, but Thomas calls it a couch. What do you call it?”