by Odie Lindsey
He was all but passed out when he heard the click of her pen, and he grumbled into his pillow.
“What?” Dru had whispered, sitting upright beside him.
He turned toward her. “Why?”
“Why am I writing?”
“Crying.”
She fidgeted for a moment. Put a brake on her thoughts. “Did I tell you that I called her ‘Sissy’? That we were—”
“Yah, yah, like sisters. You told me. I’m sorry you’re sad again.”
“Not again. Always.”
He’d issued a grunt of support.
“Dying is the easy part,” she said.
His hand had slid onto her thigh, and he patted it. He knew the story: she’d been conditioned to carry the guilt. Made to believe she was the cause of Sissy’s death. By her aunt and her parents; by her friends and Pitchlynn families—or so she detailed for him again and again. Following a brief, blurred period of anguish, of shame, of . . . well, he wasn’t quite sure, Dru’s folks had sent her off to school. From there, semester after semester she’d come home for a portion of the holiday break, though most often she spent holidays with her parents in holiday destinations. Summers were for camp or family travel, or, later, for part-time clerkish jobs in exclusive, second-home locales. Positions procured care of her family’s social networks, and which removed Dru from confrontation with either kin or hometown.
No matter where she was placed, nobody had ever talked about Lucy George. Over the years, Dru had rarely been home long enough to ask.
“Sorry, babe,” JP whispered. “So sorry.”
“Why?” She nudged him. “Why, exactly, are you sorry?”
He mumbled something and passed out.
4
On a hot Saturday morning in June, Dru told him she was coming along to scout properties with flip potential. She didn’t ask. Didn’t suggest. She told.
JP did not welcome the intrusion. Yet he also knew which hill to die on, and this wasn’t it. So he stepped into the bathroom and groused in the mirror, then called out, “Wear jeans and a T-shirt. These homes are nasty. Trash, animal waste. Human waste, even. No water, so you can’t wash your hands.”
Dru put on a short yellow skirt, white tee, and sneakers. He gave her a look, then grabbed his tool belt and clipboard and a couple of high-powered Maglites.
“Let’s go, then, tough stuff.”
They drove west on Monroe toward Garfield Park, past dishwater catfish joints and bilingual title loans, liquor stores and old brick churches. The cloudless sky was chalked by airplane contrails. JP turned onto a side street lined by moldered historic homes, mansions-turned-multi-units with spires and sagged roofs, their slipped shingles like lost teeth. The lots were large and overgrown, and the porches and curbs overflowed with people. Young and old paused to stare at JP’s vehicle, an alien craft that would bring nothing good.
The Queen Anne on his docket was a brick construction, circa 1890. Plywood covered the downstairs windows, and the intricate masonry was eroded. He cut the car engine and glanced at Dru’s skirt. “Don’t worry about the neighbors,” he said. “Ignore them and you’ll be fine, promise.”
She glared at him, stepped out, and slammed the car door. “Hey, y’all!” she called to the onlookers. They paused, and some waved, and then all went back to their lives.
JP stomped to the rear of the SUV, then lifted the gate and threw his leather tool apron over his shoulder. “Point made,” he said. “Now let’s go.”
When she began chewing him out in front of the others, JP had dropped his gear and wrapped his arms around his wife, lifting her high in the air. He carried her into the shade of the crumbling front porch, all but crushing her words. There, the damp aroma of wood rot hit Dru’s sinuses. When he placed her down, she shut her eyes and steadied herself against the banister.
“You okay?” JP asked. “Dru? Christ, babe, you okay? I’m sorry, I—”
“Two seconds,” she said softly. “Don’t freak out, okay?”
“I was just nervous. Embarrassed. I didn’t mean to grip you so hard, I—”
“Shh. Really. It’s okay.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m not that pregnant. You just squeezed my lungs out, turkey.”
5
And many months later, in winter, the NPR droned as they drove downtown. Dru stared out the passenger window, to the ice-crust lots and the bundled lot who trudged toward the “L” station or bus stop, their bodies bent against the wind.
“It’s not the dog on the highway,” she said, turning down the volume. “It’s the kids, Jayp. The kids.”
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“You sure as shit don’t.”
That remark almost caught him. His jaw clenched as he imagined pulling to the side of the road, ordering her out. Despite himself, he could all but feel the rush of frigid air into the car cabin as she marched away in the snow—and he liked it. For a breath, anyway.
“Can you even still call them that? Kids?” she asked. “It’s a gang initiation, where these kids . . . These . . . The new thing is that they have to steal a dog. Like, someone’s dog, Jayp. To jump into the gang, they have to throw the dog over the retaining wall. At rush hour, between barriers, they just chuck it into traffic. After that, the older members bet on how long the thing will live.”
“This is why Animal Control exists, babe. They’ll—”
“No. They won’t. They won’t shut the interstate down to save one goddamned dog.” She kicked the underside of the dash. “Don’t you get it? This will come back to them. If the kids grow up a bit, and get wise, then what they’ve done is gonna wear them down. The memory will tear ’em apart.”
They sat in silence, in gridlock.
“It’s time for me to go home, Jayp,” she stated. “You’ll like it down there. I promise. And I’ll be so much better. You’ll love me again. You will—”
“Okay,” he said, his eyes on the street ahead.
“Okay?” she perked. “Like, for real ‘okay’?”
His smile had carried them over a few more blocks. He then turned the radio back up, though not loud enough to be abrasive, calculating that, as she had before, Dru would calm down with the wearing of the day. She would realize that life was in fact pretty fair and wonderful here. He wagered that upon his picking her up after work she would admit that she’d just lost it a bit; she would confess that she was simply, extraordinarily uncomfortable and emotional, was worried about carrying to term. That she was sorry for this weakness, and that things would be fine.
He swore on all that she only needed a little bit of sun. A little Vitamin D, B12, and ‘Sky’s out!’ And, oh yeah, to not be pregnant.
JP tapped the accelerator as he anticipated yet another description of the buttery warmth of Mississippi. He knew that later that night, Dru would describe, again, how at the first hint of Spring—like, sometimes as early as February, Jayp!—daffodils would thrust up on every length of sidewalk and side yard. How the spectacle of saucer-sized, pink and white dogwood blossoms would follow suit, as would redbud and white azalea, blue hydrangea and pink crepe myrtle. Dru would surely make a case for the late-summer rows of small green cotton square buds, and the clean perspiration of July and August. And after he balked at this last claim—he had been there in summer, and there was no such thing as refreshing Mississippi sweat—he knew she would swat him, and admit that, Okay, well, summer’s kinda awful! That she would in turn make him admit that summer in Chicago was no picnic, either. Would insist he agree that the lack of airplanes overhead, anytime, sounded fantastic. Make him commit to a dream lacking air brakes and smog, and to the laze and the core of cordiality. He would be made to pledge allegiance to pulled pork sandwiches and hot tamales, and to having to stock up on beer every Saturday, since Sundays were legally reserved for the sole purchase of the Lord.
“Lovely, right?” she’d insist. “And those trance blues?” With this question, she would nudge him. “You know you love ’em. So you can
’t wait, right?”
He would answer Yes, and Yes, again, and he would tell her he couldn’t wait to get down South (knowing full well that the proposed move would be compartmentalized into yet another long weekend trip, or two, or three). He’d nudge her back and smile, and pat her tummy. “Can’t wait.”
As he pulled up to her building, JP knew that Dru would produce a Post-it note pad, make a record of his promise, and stuff it in her coat pocket. She did exactly that.
6
Her Braxton Hicks contractions rolled in like the front surf of a hurricane. The birthing process was co-directed by their hippie doula and their golf-ball-swatting ob-gyn in a reserved, decoratable hospital room on a fiercely clinical ward. The machine readouts were offset by JP’s playlist and Dru’s dimmed lights.
As the crowning drew close, she shoved and pushed and pained for endless hours, the doula offering deep tissue rubs and position adjustments . . . until at last the birth mother announced, “Fuck this. Bring on the goods,” and a nurse anesthetist was enlisted.
Childbirth was a hybrid, as were the parents. For a time, they were unified by awe.
***
DRU CALLED JP on the morning of her death; she called him more than once. He didn’t answer. The phone records would reflect that she had then dialed her old house phone in Pitchlynn, though that line had been disconnected after her mother passed. (The Wallis Farm manor had been empty for quite some time.)
While JP didn’t know about the letter mailed to Susan George, he rushed home to find a Post-it note on the kitchen table. It was a print version of the text she had sent him a half hour earlier: Fed Lucy. Going out. Back later. She’d drawn a circle around the words.
Beside the table, the infant snoozed beneath thick blankets in a Moses-like bassinet. He gathered Lucy up and held her. He waited and waited and waited.
The North Mississippi Cardinal ran as many details as they could muster, though this was for the most part a cobbling of wire feed: the deceased had climbed up onto a concrete jersey barrier on the opposite side of the gang initiates, and the dog. She had for a moment watched the latter lope back and forth along the shoulder. Car after car throttled past the event, their Doppler honks driving the dog from lane to lane. Et cetera.
The Tribune and Sun-Times ran this same basic feed. The Reader ran a piece about socially conscious blunders, while the ASPCA released a statement that one’s own self-interest must take precedence over the interests of an animal.
NEW MOTHER DIES SAVING DOG
TRAPPED ON INTERSTATE
JP gave no comment. Arrangements were “not yet complete.”
7
Oh, but that first-ever trip South had been a miracle. It had proven to be one of so many visits to come: O’Hare to Memphis or Hattiesburg, Midway to Jackson or Gulfport . . . then back again. Weekends built of getaway fares and frequent flyer payouts, which Dru had booked with increasing, near-habitual frequency. These journeys were the idyll. The stuff. The flush. Whatever the label, they were also abiding: as history, as sensory, as, well . . . Dru.
Which was why JP had refused to let them go, as he tried to plow forward, in Chicago, alone.
He couldn’t do it. He recognized soon enough that their relationship was fading, that the fine etchings of memory were eroding with time. When the feel of Mississippi sun through car window became conceptual-only, as did the aroma of alluvial or blackland soil, or the thump of the music, or even the maddening vision of hateful iconography—he decided, at last, to move down to Pitchlynn.
This had been his promise to Dru, sure. Yet more so, it was the only way to keep her alive. It was the only way to recall a guitar lick on a rental car stereo on the way to a goat roast, to a house-party-picnic, the one to which Dru had taken him on that first-ever trip South. It was the only sure reminder that the composition had consisted of two parts: a slippery jangle on the tenor guitar strings and a chukka-chukka-boom on the bass.
JP refused to lose control of this detail. He could not risk not remembering.
He moved to Pitchlynn to recall the slink of this Hill-Country-not-Delta blues, a blues as is thrust forward by a lean setup of snare drum, of cymbal and kick that slashes into the background of the guitar, chugging in circles, constantly repeating, revolving, again and again.
No. No matter what. No matter what codes he’d have to violate, or how abrasive he’d have to live, JP would not let these details go. He would not relinquish the beat, the drawl, revolving, again. This music, its prolonged, rounded crests whose feminine thrum pulses into rhapsody, revolves onto itself. Is memorized. Over and again, it revolves, alive. Is living forever.
They had driven north on Highway 7, toward some turnoff Dru swore she would recognize, another sub-county road near an old A.M.E. church—or so she thought she remembered.
She had turned down the music. “Best!”
“Best?” JP asked.
“Best! Best catfish. Heat. Music. People. Natural world. The best of us is here, I promise.”
He looked over and was crushed by her brown-with-gold-flecked irises, and by the caramel-brown hair fanned in the open window wind. “If you say so,” he said. “I’ll—”
“Turn! Turn here, turn, turn!”
The tires squealed when JP whipped it onto the thin, potholed stretch of road, and into some lost country interior. The fields beside them were even more desolate and weedy, yet somehow also teeming and wild, marred now and again by gutted structures of tarpaper and scrap. The sun now struck them from a near-horizontal hover, its maize-orange smoldering into rose. Twenty or so miles later, they came upon a community cast in the thinnest green of new evening, and a cluster of small farm homes un-choked by stoplight or grocery or gas station. In front of the homes was a hum of activity, from barbecue pit smoke to driveway basketball games to folks who simply hung around porches rocking, or folks who hung around yards with neighbors, their forearms at rest on defunct cars, the hulls of which were installed on the property like sculpture.
At last, as promised, they reached the site of the best celebration they would ever attend (including the one on that Chicago rooftop deck, and the exultant dinner that followed their City Hall wedding). A stretch of dated vehicles were parked on either side of the road. Partygoers milled about, or were plunked down on open tail gates, laughing, and sipping beers. The brunt of the pilgrims walked toward a small, leaning farmhouse, as was surrounded by scrapwood outbuildings.
“Aw hell yes,” Dru said, reaching over to drum JP’s thigh. They got out of the car, stretched, and took in the surroundings. She exchanged a Hey, y’all with a cluster of revelers, then pulled him on, toward the sound of live music.
Fifteen minutes later, the piping-hot catfish crumbled over his tongue and white bread coated his teeth. Peppered batter and Louisiana hot sauce made his nostrils drip. He mouthed a Holy shit, and whistled the heat away.
“My word,” he exclaimed.
“Told you, Jayp,” Dru replied. “What’d I tell you?”
He wagged his napkin-wrapped sandwich as if he were a pastor with a Bible, then turned to the large woman behind the plywood food counter. “You’re an angel.”
The woman bellowed, “Not yet! I’ll see you for seconds, man.”
The catfish and goat sandwiches were a buck apiece, as were the Budweisers pulled from the ice in a metal trough. The food stand was a makeshift setup beneath a tilted carport of old flashing and warped four-by-four posts. The crowd of locals, ages nineteen to ninety, were clad in jeans or overalls or coveralls, alongside a few who had dudded up in slashes of color. Intermingled with the African American community at heart were gritty White hipsters from Memphis, soused university Greeks from Oxford, and a flock of bespectacled folklorists with mounted cameras and mics. As the last jade traces of dusk seeped away, a talc-fine dirt drifted into the halo of yellow floodlights.
A single speaker PA and mic were set up in the yard. A guitar, dissonantly tuned, blared straight through a beater Peavey amp, wh
ile a nearby mismatched drum kit went without amplification. Songs were built around that same boom-chukka-boom heard in the rental car, and the glistened bodies of young and old wriggled and writhed together in trancelike stupor.
Dru asked JP to dance, but he was too shy, or perhaps too afraid. She mocked him gently for this, then left him standing alone as she swayed into the crowd. Partners quickly clustered around her, their hips and torsos swaying into the precise curves of her own. From the margin of the crowd JP sipped beer and bobbed his head, wishing he had the guts to get in there.
With the turnover of the performers, Dru walked back to him, one hand holding her hair up while the other fanned her neck.
“You gotta get over yourself and get out there, Jayp.”
“I’m workin’ on it.”
They moved to a wooden picnic table at the shadowy edge of the crowd, then sat on the top with their feet on the bench. JP pointed out the slice of moon hanging just above the roofline of the farm shack.
“A sentimentalist,” Dru said. “How refreshing.” She dipped her head onto his shoulder, then put her hand on his knee to still his tapping foot. “You okay?”
“Perfect,” JP answered. “Best.”
She kissed him, and nothing else existed. Nothing else ever would.
Over the next couple of hours they talked, they kissed. They drank more beer, and kissed. At some point, Dru made clear that though she hated the idea of leaving, and “in particular of leaving off of all this kissing,” it was a long drive back to Pitchlynn. She also noted that the party would soon turn into a smear of too much moonshine and too many boisterous country teenagers. Thumping break beats would soon smother the blues licks, and while this, too, made for a hell of a soundtrack, the kids would also sneak too many beers, trying to act like adults, while the old men would surely act like brazen youngsters, firing their sidearms at the moon.
