“I believe it was you who asked me out,” Jesse says.
“Which was a totally slutty thing to do.”
“You aren’t a slut.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
Johona scoffs at this. “Anyhow, why’d you say yes then?” she says.
“You remind me of someone,” Jesse says.
“A girlfriend?”
“More than that. You could be her twin.”
“So she was super foxy.”
“She was beautiful.”
Johona wasn’t expecting a serious reply. She pauses, then says, “What was her name?”
Claudine. Claudine Dejardin. Though the night Jesse met her, she called herself Pythia.
SEES ALL, KNOWS ALL promised the signboard on her booth, one of many lining the midway of a traveling fair set up in a pasture on the edge of Monongah. A month earlier the same field had been the site of a weeklong outdoor revival meeting, which hadn’t interested Jesse in the least. The fair, though, with its faintly sinister, faintly salacious air and maze of colorful wagons and patched canvas tents, strummed a restless chord in him. So one Saturday, after ten hours of drudgery at the sawmill where he’d been working since he’d been old enough to work, he hurried over to see what he could see.
The encampment was lit by flaming torches and strings of electric bulbs that shone like little suns. A steam calliope whistled out “A Picture No Artist Could Paint” and “My Wild Irish Rose,” the music so loud, you stopped trying to be heard over it after a while and pointed instead. Pointed at the sword swallower and the fat lady, pointed at the shooting gallery and Jacob’s ladder, pointed at the horse that could count. The lights, music, and frenzied whirl of strangeness worked magic on the crowd. Normally stoic farmers grinned around penny cigars, their stone-faced wives tittered like young girls, and their kids gaped goggle-eyed at the spectacle of an honest-to-God African Pygmy sitting on the shoulder of the World’s Tallest Cowpoke.
Jesse bought popcorn and watched folks ride the pleasure wheel and the roundabout. He blew two bits throwing baseballs, trying to win a vase for Mama but walking away with only a Chinese finger trap. A barker spieled him into laying down a nickel to see a flicker projected onto the wall of a tent, ghostly footage of a parade in New York City. In another tent—GENTLEMEN ONLY—two sleepy girls danced the hoochie-coochie in peekaboo harem getups for most of the male parishioners of the First Baptist Church.
Too shy himself to stare openly at the dancers, Jesse pretended to look at the ground, sneakily raising his eyes to watch without lifting his head. He was starting to enjoy the show when a coworker of his, Wade Finney, sidled up with his tongue hanging out.
“The redhead’ll suck your pecker for three bucks,” he whispered like someone who knew something.
“That so?” Jesse said.
The notion of sticking his pecker anywhere Wade’s had been held no appeal. He waited until the fool was absorbed in the show again and slipped back out onto the midway. Claudine was standing outside her booth.
“You want me to tell your fortune, Monsieur?” she called to him, playing up her French accent.
Her eyes were rimmed with kohl, her lips painted red. Wild black hair spilled down her back, and silver stars decorated the blue robe she wore, stars that glittered under the torches like the real thing. Right then and there Jesse’s map was redrawn. All roads would lead to her forever after.
He sat across from her in her candlelit stall. Sweet smoke curled out of a brass incense burner shaped like a dragon. Claudine gestured at the deck of tarot cards and the crystal ball on the table between them.
“What is your question?” she said.
“Are you really a gypsy?” Jesse said.
“Among other things.”
“We got an old woman around here who about drowned when she was a girl. She can tell your future by looking in a teacup.”
“There are many ways to lift the veil.”
Jesse pointed at the crystal ball. “You can see the future in that?”
“Those with the gift of prophecy can,” Claudine said.
Jesse leaned forward to peer into the ball. “It’s true,” he said. “I see it clear as day: You and me are gonna fall madly in love.”
Claudine told him later that she tried to call a roustabout to bounce him for his sass but couldn’t get her mouth to work right.
“You’d already laid me low,” she said.
A mariachi band approaches the booth where Jesse, Johona, and Edgar are sitting. A man wearing a sombrero and strumming a guitar asks if they’d like to hear anything special. Johona makes a request.
“What’s this?” Jesse says when the band starts to play.
“‘Paloma Negra,’” Johona says. “My dad always asks for it.”
“What’s it about?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Johona gives the musicians a dollar when they finish, and they move on to the next table. Edgar is done eating and getting restless.
“I want to play more pinball,” he says.
“We’ll get a move on soon,” Jesse says. “Hold your horses.”
“I know something else fun we could do,” Johona says.
“What?” Edgar says.
“It’s a surprise,” Johona says. “You up for a surprise?”
“I guess I am,” Edgar says, like he’s accepting a challenge.
“What about you?” Johona says to Jesse.
He feels uneasy, as if he’s wandered too far out onto thin ice. At the same time he’s not yet ready to end the night. So he’s going to ignore his misgivings and take Johona where she wants to go, spend a while longer courting Claudine’s ghost.
As they get up to leave, Edgar sings softly.
“‘I’ve been to Hollywood, I’ve been to Redwood.’”
“Hey!” Johona says.
“I know Neil Young,” Edgar says. “Jesse don’t, but I do.”
They drive out of town and wind along a narrow road up the side of a mountain. Johona has Jesse take a turnoff that ends at a wide, flat overlook with a view of the city.
“Park in the bushes in case the cops cruise by,” she says.
Jesse pulls into a hollow in a mesquite thicket where the Grand Prix will be hidden from view. He, Johona, and Edgar get out and walk back to the viewpoint. The ground is littered with cigarette butts, crushed beer cans, and McDonald’s wrappers. Broken glass glints in the uncannily bright light of a bit of moon blazing overhead. Edgar bends and comes up with an empty shotgun shell.
“People party here,” Johona says.
She leads the brothers up a short trail to a natural bench on top of a boulder. The three of them sit against the rock, which even now is still warm from the sun. Phoenix sparkles below like diamonds strewn across the desert. The night is perfectly calm, not even a tickle of a breeze. A helicopter hovers silently above downtown, tethered to the earth by the beam of its spotlight.
“I can see all the way to Monongah,” Edgar says. He tosses a rock, another, another.
“Quit it,” Jesse says.
Johona lights a cigarette. Jesse can smell the bowling alley on her behind the perfume she’s wearing.
“Tell me more about Claudine,” she says.
“What do you want to know?” Jesse says.
“How long’s it been since you two were together?”
They met at the fair in June 1900. Jesse was twenty-four, Claudine looked to be twenty or so but said she’d been born in 1727 or ’28 somewhere in France. She’d once carried a baptism certificate as a reminder but lost it on one of the many occasions she’d had to run for her life. “What does it matter now anyway?” she said. A birthdate was important to someone plotting a course across time, but since turning, she drifted in eternity, a sea without shores.
Johona blows a smoke ring, waiting for an answer.
“It’s been a long time since I last saw her,” Jesse says.
“Were you in love?�
�
“I’d say so.”
Every turning is a love story. Love for a woman, a man, a child, for life itself, for darkness and the things found only there. Jesse fell for Claudine the moment he saw her. She fell for him just as quickly. They made love that first night in a bed of tall grass on the bank of Booth’s Creek.
Jesse had been with other girls, but it was nothing like being with Claudine. She breathed fire into him that raced through his body, burning every dead tree and tumbledown shack, every briar patch and bog inside him. After he came white hot, he lay beside her gloriously empty, gloriously free, for the first time in his life.
Claudine hurried away before dawn that morning and the next and the next. He asked to see her during the day, but she refused. He knew she was hiding something, thought it might be a husband or a child. “Tell me,” he urged her again and again. “Tell me what’s wrong,” and on what was supposed to be their last night together—the fair moving on the next day—she finally revealed her secret.
They were down by the creek again, but she wouldn’t let him touch her this time. Many years earlier, she said, she’d made a choice. In exchange for eternal life and health, she’d infected herself with a sickness—an unholy, incurable sickness, the pain of which was dulled only by drinking the blood of other humans. She and others like her were called rovers. They lived like nomads, keeping constantly on the move in order to avoid detection and surreptitiously stalking victims in the night.
Jesse wonders still how she knew he wouldn’t raise an alarm or kill her himself after hearing her story, how she sensed the despair and loneliness plaguing him and his intense, near-violent desire to escape the drudgery and hopelessness of Monongah. He wasn’t frightened or repulsed when she finished her confession; he was buzzing with strange excitement.
“You’ve witched me somehow,” he said.
“Why?” Claudine replied.
“Because none of what you told me changes how I feel about you.”
“If I was a witch, I’d make you disappear,” Claudine said. “I’d fix it so I’d never met you.”
Jesse grabbed her hand and pulled it to his chest. “I want to come with you,” he said.
“You’ll have to leave everything behind, your whole life,” Claudine said. “You’ll be an outcast. You’ll live by new laws.”
“Your law,” Jesse said. “I’ll live by your law.”
Claudine turned him that night. He remembers her blood trickling down his throat, the heat of it, the stink of it. He remembers the thunder in his brain and the lightning in his veins as he was destroyed and reborn.
“How long did you go out?” Johona says.
“Not long,” he says.
“Did you break up with her, or did she break up with you?”
More memories come, memories Jesse doesn’t want to revisit. “Tell me something about you now,” he says.
Johona puffs on her cigarette. “I’ve been thinking I’d like being a chef,” she says. “Not a cook, a real chef.”
“You any good in the kitchen?”
“I burn water, but I could learn. My plan is to go to cooking school somewhere cool like L.A. or New York, somewhere something’s happening. Have you ever been to L.A.?”
“Lots of times,” Jesse says.
“Isn’t it bitchin’? My old boyfriend and me went once. Venice Beach, Universal Studios. We got stoned with this old hippie and walked all the way down Hollywood Boulevard.”
“L.A.’s too big for me,” Jesse says. “I’m a country boy.”
“I love that it’s big. I love that you can get lost there.”
Edgar stands and points.
“Skunk,” he says.
Johona stands too.
“Where?”
“Down in them bushes.”
Johona squints.
“It’s too dark,” she says.
“A mama and a baby.”
“Can you see them?” Johona says to Jesse.
Jesse gets up to look. The disgruntled mutter of powerful engines held in check catches his attention instead. Someone’s coming up the road. Headlight beams bounce across the overlook.
“Duck,” Johona says. “If it’s cops, they’ll bust us.”
Jesse crouches and pulls Edgar down with him.
10
I KNOW MICKEY MOUSE IS A CARTOON. HIM AND MINNIE AND Tom and Jerry. Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo. Woody Woodpecker and Fred Flintstone. Popeye Bluto Olive Oyl Wimpy and all them.
But the folks that show the cartoons are real. You got Quick-Fire McIntyre in Birmingham Uncle Bob in Tucson Mr. Patches in St. Louis Happy Herb in Indianapolis Fred and Fae in Denver Captain Delta in Stockton Cactus Vick in Little Rock and Lorenzo in Tulsa.
I know radio and TV come through the air but the telephone needs a wire. I know everything costs money plus tax. Ten pennies makes a dime. Ten dimes makes a dollar. So do four quarters. I can pump gas and wash bugs off the windshield. I can drive if there’s not too many curves. I bet I can change a tire.
If you want to win a fight kick a man in the balls. It ain’t real fighting in the movies. They got bottles that break easy. A king beats a queen a queen beats an ace an ace beats everything. If you shake a pinball machine too hard you’ll tilt it.
Stars are cold so’s the moon. The sun’s hot. Hotter than hell. It can cook you just like that. Don’t drink out of cricks ’cause cows shit in them. If your kid has asthma stick a lock of his hair in a hole in a sourwood tree a little higher up than the kid is tall. When the boy grows taller than the hole his asthma’ll be gone.
Some people are sad and some ain’t. Jesse’s sad. He got sad when Claudine got dusted and stayed that way. Daddy was happy most the time. Mama was happy. I’m happy except when the Little Devil starts in. He ain’t happy nor sad nor mean nor nice. All he is is hungry or not hungry. He’s nothing but need and teeth and claws.
I saved a dog once and I saved a man.
The dog belonged to Mr. Sayre. I was hunting crawdads down by the crick and I heard some pitiful howling and whining. I first thought to run home but said to myself, You ain’t yella, and snuck to the noise keeping well hid.
Mr. Sayre’s pup Queenie had one of her paws stuck in a beaver trap. She was crying and thrashing and snapped at me when I come close. I had the idea to use the tow sack I was carrying for the crawdads to cover her muzzle so she couldn’t get at me. She took off when I sprung her and run crying all the way back to Mr. Sayre’s house. He give me a dollar coin and a bag of peppermint sucks for setting her free and said she’d’ve died if I didn’t come along. Her leg was broke too bad to fix but she got around fine on three.
The man I saved was a miner that turned up missing at the end of a shift. A wop named Scalo. The bossman called everybody in to search. Daddy wasn’t none too happy about it. Said, The bastard’s probably drunk in some tavern.
He was pulling on his boots getting ready to go and I was playing with ants on the porch drawing a finger across their trail to watch them scatter when a blackness come crashing down on me. Daylight turned dark and I thought I’d been struck blind but little by little like they do when you go from inside to out at night my eyes started working again. Only I wasn’t on the porch no more I was down in the mine.
Daddy took me into the pit when I was a boy. We rode a car down then got off and walked along a tunnel. We had lanterns but the light from them didn’t do nothing but make the dark darker. Coal dust swirled and water dripped. Daddy told me about blackdamp and whitedamp—poison gases that’ll kill you after one whiff—and the deeper we went the harder it got for me to breathe.
Daddy dropped a rock into a shaft and told me to listen for it to hit bottom. It never did. I got the notion Daddy was gonna toss me down the hole next. This give me a fright and I run off down the tunnel. I didn’t get far before I tripped and my lantern went out and I fainted dead away. Daddy had to carry me back up top.
On the porch I wasn’t scared at all. I could see in the dark as good as in da
y. And what I seen was the wop. A beam had fallen and trapped his legs. There was his lantern and there was his lunch pail. The lantern had gone out. He banged his pail against the wall and called for help then lay down and prayed in Italian.
When the dark lifted a figure popped into my head: Number 8 Left Heading. I run in the house to tell Daddy. I told him I seen the wop and told him the figure. He grumped and said he ought to whup me for lying.
What is that? Mama asked. Number 8 Left Heading? It’s a drift in the mine, Daddy said. Mama’s eyes got big. You got to take him to tell someone about this, she said. What am I supposed to say? Daddy asked her. My idiot son had a vision? Twenty-two years old and can’t shave himself? Can’t go to the store without getting lost? That was a lie. I knew the way to the store. And if you don’t say something and that man dies? Mama said.
They fought on it a while longer till Mama put her foot down. If you don’t take him I will, she said. Goddammit, Daddy said and me and him set off for the mine.
Daddy talked to the bossman. He was busy telling crews to search here and search there and busy telling guards to keep the townfolk who came to see the commotion back from the adit. Daddy pulled him aside and said, I’m sorry, and, I know it sounds crazy, and, The wife you understand.
The bossman looked at me looked at Daddy and looked at me again. He had a map of the mine in front of him. Number 8 Left Heading, he said tracing it with a finger. That section’s been closed for a year. Still he sent a crew to check. They found the door to the tunnel ajar and the wop pinned by a fallen timber where he snuck in to take a nap.
I saved him but I couldn’t save Daddy. A year later the mine exploded when he was down there with three hundred others. They went looking for survivors and Mama begged me to try again to see into the darkness. Nothing came to me hard as I thought. They brought Daddy’s body up four days later. What was left of it. Barely enough to bury, Mama said.
I know proper is a coffin. I know proper is a stone and flowers. The folks we kill don’t get none of that ’cept for sometimes a prayer. I know one or two good ones.
Rovers Page 7
