Taft

by Ann Patchett

  "Money?"

  I held up the bag. "From the bar."

  "I thought it always stayed in the cash register," she said, and pulled on her jacket.

  A person would think I'd feel a lot more worried taking this girl to the bank with me, since now I was responsible for both her and the money, but the truth was I liked it better this way. I was thinking about her and not the roaming crackheads. She got out of the car and followed me right to the cash drawer. I took the key out of my pocket and opened it up.

  "You have a key to the bank?" Fay said, impressed.

  "Only to a very small part of it." Then I dropped the money in.

  "Like mailing a letter," she said, watching the blue bag slide down the chute into someplace nobody could get at it.

  I was thinking, Hell of a letter.

  Fay didn't talk going over to her house. She just gave me directions and none of them in advance. She told me to get on Union and keep going. We went through downtown, past long stretches of sleeping auto body shops and used car lots, past Sun studios and the Baptist hospital, where Marion used to work. The only bright thing that time of night was the occasional Jim Dandy store, lit up in a firestorm of electric lights. "You want anything," I said, and pointed to one up ahead. "Soda or anything?" I don't know why I was asking.

  "No, I'm fine, thanks." Fay kept a sharp eye out the window, looking for her brother in every direction. Union was getting nicer all the time, until finally we were out past the big houses on Landis and she started pointing to where I should turn, Poplar then Chickasaw. Out there the lawns all looked like parks trimmed with mazes of dried out winter hedges. Everybody seemed to have at least a half dozen columns. This was old money Memphis. This is what the people out in Germantown dreamed about.

  "Up here," she said, and pointed. God knows, there wasn't a bus going from where we'd been to all the way out there. A cab would have cost her half of what she'd made that night. "It isn't our house," she said when I pulled into the driveway. "It's my aunt and uncle's."

  "Nice," I said. Big and brick with a castle thing on the front. Everything trimmed and straight and squared away. It wasn't by any means the biggest place out there, but it still would have made a nice small hotel.

  "It's not the kind of house I'd live in," Fay said, even though it was clear she lived there. Maybe she didn't want me to think she was a rich girl and didn't really need the job, or maybe she was apologizing for having nice things. "Well, thanks for bringing me. I know it's a haul, middle of the night and everything." She had her hand on the door, but she was just sitting there, looking at the house, which was dark except for a front porch light. "Can you find your way back all right?"

  "I'll wait here," I told her. "You go in and check for Carl."

  "Oh, no," she said. "Don't do that. You've got things to do. Carl's fine. He's just sleeping, I bet. I bet he just forgot."

  "I'll wait here," I said. The longer we sat there, the more I was sure he wasn't inside.

  Fay nodded at me and got out of the car. She tried to close the door quietly and wound up not getting it closed all the way. I shooed her off when she started to try again. She leaned over to unlock the front door of her house and then she went inside.

  It was a whole lot quieter out there than it was where I lived. No traffic noise, no voices, no loud girls telling each other their business outside every window. I turned off the car and held my breath without thinking about it. I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard such quiet. I saw lights going on upstairs. On in one room then off, on in another. It wouldn't be a good thing if someone was to open their curtains and see me out there, a black man sitting in his green Chevy Nova. A black man sitting in such a white driveway, waiting on this white girl. Whether or not a person was doing something wrong very rarely figured into these things. Being there in the first place, that's trouble enough.

  Fay was walking a lot quicker coming out of the door than she was going into it. She got in the car. "Not there," she said, looking at me.

  I sighed. Whatever it meant, it wasn't going to be good. "Maybe he went out with some friends."

  "Carl doesn't have any friends," she said.

  "Did you tell your aunt and uncle?" I knew full well that she hadn't, that she hadn't been inside long enough, that she wouldn't have told them based on what she'd said about their house, that if she had told them she wouldn't be sitting in the car with me.

  "I'm not going to wake anybody up," she said.

  I drummed my fingers against the steering wheel and thought about it for a minute, all of it. "Then I guess you're going to have to go inside and wait. If he isn't home by the time it gets light, I'd say you should call the police." Not the advice I would have given anybody else I knew, but with Fay it was all I could come up with.

  "I'm not going back in there," she said. "I'm not going to wait around and call the police. We'll just have to find him."

  Five minutes ago she didn't want to impose on me to wait in the driveway. "Where do you suggest we look for him?" I said.

  "I don't know. I thought maybe you'd have some ideas."

  "I don't know Carl."

  "You know where people go," Fay said.

  Let's say we could be sure he wasn't in his bed, wasn't at my apartment, probably wasn't at Marion's parents' house. That would leave the rest of Memphis. Maybe I knew where people went, some people, people who were older, people who played music. Maybe I knew where they went a couple of years ago and what I remembered I didn't like: after-hours clubs that closed up and moved without any notice, around the zoo, in the trees where nobody can see you; a couple of bad apartments in bad buildings in bad neighborhoods where people bought their drugs and became so overwhelmed with the sweet smell that they did them right there in the hall way. I liked none of it. I didn't want to go looking for places like that. I didn't want to go there because those were the places where people shot you for fun. Those were places where people got picked up without anyone first checking on the crime. I couldn't take Fay in with me and I couldn't leave her in the car and I couldn't find out a thing by driving around. Nobody tells you anything. The trick is to see it, accidentally, all by yourself. Maybe Carl was worth saving, but I wasn't the person to do it. Fay was staring at me. She was planted so deep inside my car I doubt I could have cut her out.

  "We'll drive around," I said. I reached over her and pushed down the button lock on her door. She looked satisfied with the way things were going. I would find some bad places that weren't so bad. Whatever I did, she wasn't going to know the difference.

  We passed out of the good neighborhood, towards parts of town she'd know nothing about. I went north up to Jackson, Hollywood, Chelsea. I tried to stay on dark streets. I wasn't interested in showing this girl every late-night thing out crawling around.

  "Slow down," she said, leaning in one direction and then the other, looking, looking. "Turn there." She pointed out an alley. It was nothing you'd want to drive down.

  "Why?" I was starting to tense up the muscles in my legs the way I used to do when I was playing. When I was nervous I kept time in my legs.

  "Just turn some more, go down some side streets. We're just staying on one road all the time. That's not going to find him."

  I wove in and out between buildings, past parked cars that looked like they'd been half eaten by something and then set on fire. Every time there was a heap on the sidewalk, a person, a bundle of papers and rags, she wanted me to slow down. I wound my way back to Union, back to where things were a little bit quieter.

  Then I drove past the bus depot.

  "Pull over," she said. "I want to look in there."

  "He's not leaving town."

  "I know he's not leaving town, but he might have just gone in there to sit."

  I pulled over to the curb and looked around. The street was quiet enough. The bums were asleep. A nest of black boys were hanging at the front door, smoking cigarettes. "You can't go in there with me," I said. I used my father's voice, the one
I saved for Franklin when I didn't want an argument. It worked on her fine. "I'm taking the keys and I'm going to stand here and watch you lock the doors. Then you're going to sit here and do nothing until I get back. That means nothing. You don't look at anybody, you don't roll your window down. You understand me?"

  "You'll look in the bathroom," she said.

  I nodded and put the keys in my pocket. Never leave the keys. Then they'll try twice as hard to get in.

  The fluorescent lights in the Memphis bus station were working overtime to light up every dirty corner of the floor. Just inside the door there was a howling bank of video games, clanging and flashing all by themselves. There was just one boy, eleven or ten, beating on one that was over on the end. He was just pretending to play, there was nothing actually going on other than the patterns the games throw up to tempt people to drop their quarters in. I moved through a cloud of cigarette smoke thicker than any bar could generate. This place was worse than a bar because the people didn't have enough money for a drink. There was a hippie girl asleep over a couple of chairs, two dirty babies asleep on her and another one who looked like them wandering around near the ticket counter. Men who are the worst kind of trouble watched her sleep and I started thinking about Fay in the car. There was a group of little boy whores in the back of the room talking to each other and one of them looked up at me and smiled when I walked by. He had a thin chest and a girlish face with pimples along the line of his jaw. I didn't go look in the bathroom.

  "Not there," I said to Fay. She was pretty pale when I opened the door and I wondered if somebody'd come by and banged on the window trying to scare her. She didn't ask if I'd looked hard enough.

  "Where's his school?" I said.

  "Why?"

  "Kids'll go over to their school sometimes, looking for trouble." I wanted to get out of this neighborhood altogether. "I used to do that. We liked to pry open a window and walk around at night. Sometimes a bunch of kids'll get together and write things on the blackboards, turn over trash cans."

  "Carl wouldn't do that."

  "Well, chances are you'd say Carl wouldn't disappear in the middle of the night either, which leads me to wonder what in the hell we're doing driving around."

  She dug her hands into her pockets and pushed herself down into the seat. "East," she said. "East High School."

  It was a relief, driving back out towards Chickasaw Gardens. We were at the school by quarter of four, but there was no sign of his car, no lights on inside. I pulled over anyway. I was past being tired. Things were starting to get that blurry glow, the way they will when you stay up too long. Fay walked behind me, wrapping her arms around herself to try and keep from the cold. We went around the chain link fence, which had been stuffed full of leaves by either the wind or children. "Look in the windows," I said.

  Fay walked over and cupped her hands around her eyes to peer inside. "There's nothing there," she said. "I told you he wouldn't come here. Carl hates this place."

  "Every kid hates high school," I said. "That's just normal." I looked around a little to make her think the trip was worth the time. I knew he wouldn't be there as much as she did. After a while I turned back towards the car.

  Fay wasn't following behind me. She was standing there, her back up against the low window. "Carl was good in school," she said. Her teeth were chattering lightly from the cold. "He was on the wrestling team. He was state-ranked. They don't even have wrestling here. Idiots."

  "I don't know a thing about wrestling," I said. "It's cold. Come on back and get in the car."

  "He did good in most of his classes. He was good in MATH," she said, saying the word math so loud that it made me nervous somebody would hear her. "He was number three in the whole state in wrestling and he was good in MATH. Goddamnit. Goddamn all of it."

  "Hey Jesus, quiet yourself." I put my hands on her shoulders and steered her back towards the car. "You want to find him, don't you? This is how you're going to find him? You need to grab hold here. Stop it with this craziness."

  Fay straightened up her back. She was breathing hard, like she was looking to fistfight with somebody. "I'm fine," she said.

  "All right, then. Let's go."

  She nodded her head. She was trying to settle herself down. "Just drive around a little while more," she said. "I know I've been asking way too much, but if you can, for just a while."

  "Sure," I said. "I can do that."

  I had never in my life heard of somebody setting off to find a person in a city and then actually coming up with them, but we kept driving. At one point I made a wrong turn and wound up on the bridge over to Arkansas. That phrase, "transporting across state lines" came into my head. "This is Arkansas," I said, then turned around and came right back. Then we were downtown again, past the Ramada and the Peabody. I don't know if I meant to drive to Beale, or if I'd just been out so long I'd run out of places to go. But something did occur to me for the first time all night. Carl loved his sister, and as late as he might ever be, he wouldn't forget about her altogether. I parked on Union and got out. Fay got out without asking me anything. All the bicycle police had ridden off and the bums had settled in for the evening to sleep in the doorways. The one sleeping in the doorway to Muddy's was Carl.

  Fay started to cry a little then, though from what combination of things it would have been hard to say. She got down and shook him hard. Maybe she wanted to see if he was dead.

  Carl batted her hand away before he ever opened his eyes. "Hey," she said to him. "Jesus Carl, wake up."

  He was about as white as a white person could have been. I do not believe that a black man can ever look as completely fucked up as a white man. Even his eyes didn't have color to them anymore. Still, he was probably better off now than he would have been if we'd found him right off the bat. "It's cold," Carl said.

  I leaned over and tried to help him up, but I could see pretty quick that that wasn't going to work. Carl wasn't walking. The only way to do it was to actually pick him up. He was small, maybe just five foot eight and awfully, awfully thin, the way boys with a predilection for drugs will be. I put my hands up under his arms and felt the skinny joint where the bone went into the socket. This boy had no means of protection in the world. He was small and not especially sharp. He had a naturally sweet way about him, which would do him a lot more harm than good. The way I saw it, the only thing he had standing in front of his destruction was Fay, and she was not such a big person herself. I wanted to get him in the car as soon as possible. I was thinking like Fay by then, better to keep this quiet. I reached down and took his legs in my other arm and carried him to the car the way I used to carry Franklin when he fell asleep at his grandparents' house after supper. Fay pushed her brother's head up against my chest so it wasn't just wagging around out there. It isn't good for a man to be carried by another man, like he was a baby. I was sorry for having to do it, but I couldn't see any other way.

  I put him in the back seat and Fay did her best to arrange him so that he looked comfortable. Then she got up front. "What do you suppose did it?"

  I told her it was drugs.

  "I know that much," she said, a little irritated.

  "You're asking me what kind of drug?" I looked in the rear-view mirror at the boy crumpled up in the back seat of my car. "You think I know things I don't know." It may have just been Southern Comfort and a couple of Valium, things that make you stupid and then kill you in your sleep.

  "You don't think he needs to go to the hospital," she said, watching him breathe.

  "If he's not dead now, I doubt it's going to kill him."

  "I should have stayed at the bar," she said. "He was just late was all. He could have frozen to death out there."

  "It isn't that cold."

  In late February the sun didn't rise until it was good and ready. I looked at my watch, thinking it must be getting on seven o'clock, but it was only four-thirty. Four-thirty in the morning and I was driving around with this waitress and her brother.


  "Don't think too bad of him," Fay said, looking in the other direction so that I could barely hear her voice. "Carl's had a real hard time. This move's been tougher on him than anybody. You'd never believe this, but it used to be before things happened that I was the one everybody thought was wild. I mean, not wild like wild, but if somebody said one of the Taft kids was in trouble you could bet it was going to be me. Carl, he was like a dog, go where you tell him, stay where you tell him. Now we're here and it's gotten to where I can hardly talk to strangers and Carl's all over the place. He thought we should've stayed in Coalfield. I don't know, maybe we should have. I don't know how we would have done it. There was no money. I mean that. None. You wouldn't think that two people could work for all those years and come up with nothing, but that's the story."

  I got back on Union one more time. I wondered why there were so many cars, where everybody could be going this time of the morning. "So something happened to your folks," I said.

  "No, not my mother. She's here. This is the turn," she pointed to the left. "My father died is all."

  I nodded my head and turned off.

  My car had a good heater on it and Fay cranked it up to high in hopes of thawing Carl out some. But the warmth seemed to put him in a deeper sleep and when we came back to that driveway neither one of us could rouse him at all.

  "Carl," Fay said. She slapped him a little, not as hard as she should have. "Come on now."

  I rested my head against the frame of the car door. It was all going bad to worse.

  "Wake up," she said. His mouth dropped open. I could see his pink tongue resting inside. "He's not waking up."

  I reached past her into the car, grabbed the collar of his sweatshirt and shook him hard. His mouth clicked open, shut, open again. "Get up!"

  "Don't break his neck," Fay said. When I let go he folded right back into his spot. I checked over my shoulder. I didn't like being outside there.

  She was quiet for a while, looking at Carl and then the door and the length of the driveway. "You're going to have to carry him in," she said.

  "No."