“I wondered about that myself, when we were waiting there.” Sam caught himself nodding, replicating Lee’s body language. Lee was the sort of man who made Sam ashamed of his education and compelled to act simple, agreeable. Without intention, his manner would become friendly and imitative, and after he would hate himself for such performances.
Watching the grave diggers, Lee’s eyes squinted as though taking the measure of something. His lips twisted around his cigarette. “I didn’t like how that one ole boy just got up and left when Miss Claire told you about the accident. Like he didn’t care at all.”
Sam nodded.
Branching smoke slunk from between Lee’s teeth. A few wet leaves stirred among the small stones ahead of them. The old woman—Miss Claire, Sam now knew—still stood on the main grounds, having stopped walking halfway to the parking lot. She and the younger woman were talking while they watched the workers continue the burial. Sam’s eyes fixed on the girl’s face, small-featured and open. Her hair danced around her shoulders as she comforted Miss Claire.
“Hey,” Lee said, and waited for Sam to look at him. He stepped closer and once again his pitch sunk to signify its seriousness. “Did you think about asking them for a test?”
“What?”
“Asking the police or somebody. For the baby. A DNA test.”
“Oh, I don’t—I think it crossed my mind, but I didn’t think so. What would be the point, I thought. Would I really want to know?”
“Yeah. Right.” Lee dropped his cigarette on the ground and stepped on it. “That’s about the same thing as I thought.” He looked out at the two men lifting the dirt, dropping it, repeating. “I didn’t like the way that ole boy just left though. You stuck around and called and found out what happened. That other seemed kind of suspicious to me.”
“Suspicious?”
“I don’t know, man. I just didn’t like it.” He checked his watch, a digital rubber device. “See you, man,” he said. “I gotta get back.” He began walking away, to the parking lot on the other side of the grave.
“Sure,” Sam said. He watched Lee’s thin form trudge toward the grave workers, wind tossing his hair and flapping his coat. He was actually the kind of man it seemed like Lana should have been with, a native, born to the land’s customs and predilections. And now Sam and he were bonded in a singular way, though he had no desire to see Lee again and in fact hoped he didn’t. Their bond was too sordid, the intimacy negative. He felt a little violated by Lee’s probing, fraternal manner.
Sam made his way back to his car, trying to order his thoughts about the gravestone and the two coffins. He couldn’t locate a true feeling, not even relief, which he’d feared might be all he was capable of. He walked into the parking lot at the same time as the brown-haired girl who’d stood by Miss Claire all day. They glanced at each other and offered polite smiles. She was cute, he thought, in a small black dress, her round eyes flush with grief. Their strides seemed to be drawing them together, and he couldn’t help glimpsing her from the corner of his eye.
The girl suddenly stumbled to her knee. She knelt in the parking lot, reaching behind her and bending a leg up in what looked like a painful contortion, a dancer’s gesture. She slipped the shoe off in a graceful, smooth pose that he thought should be a sculpture somewhere.
“Are you okay?” He asked.
“I broke my heel.” She sat back on her calves and sighed. This distraught air made her more real to him, drawing him to her face and the hand holding the black shoe. She looked beleaguered but strong, the fringes of her hair undulating on the wind.
She stared up at him and he found his mind suddenly blank. He smiled and reached out and took her shoe with inappropriate joy, given their surroundings. He grinned as if he could already see that in a couple short weeks he’d be describing this woman, Joanne Reaver, as someone he loved.
IT WAS ON THEIR THIRD WEEKEND TOGETHER THAT JOANNE took Sam on a drive along the Creole Nature Trail, and she told him about Lana’s father. Sam was still thinking about that story when they got home from the trip, and he found the police had left him a message.
The police, apparently, had not known that on the day she died, Lana Slaton was on her way to meet three men to whom she’d sent letters. Nor were they aware of the contents of that letter. This information wasn’t secret, but they hadn’t asked, and Miss Claire only mentioned it in passing one day when two deputies came in for breakfast. Since then they’d taken another look at Lana’s car and found that the brake lines had been tampered with.
So they’d asked to talk to Sam in person. After he’d answered their questions, two hours’ worth, they’d let him go, not because he had alibis (he didn’t; he’d been cloistered back then, still fooling himself about writing a novel), but because the officers were sufficiently convinced that he wouldn’t have any idea how to tamper with brake lines, which was the truth.
For weeks after that, Joanne seemed wary of him while pretending not to be.
She’d ask, “What are you doing?” sharply, with suspicion—though she wouldn’t mean to—when she caught him doing something that for unclear reasons upset her, like staring at a wall.
They had been talking about moving in together, but that stopped. She still demanded he be present, though, usually at her house, and their sex life didn’t suffer much. For his part, Sam was glad for the silence, the long reflective spaces which more and more were filled with thoughts of Lana. He thought of the story Joanne had told him, imagined the little girl taking all those long walks into unfamiliar places, forced to pass strangers shameful notes. Alone. And he thought about her baby.
Later that month, Lee Robicheaux was arrested for the murder of Lana Slaton and her child, Aidan Jefferson Slaton. The trial date had yet to be announced. Sam kept smelling the briny, petroleum odors that Lee had given off. The way he’d called Sam “brother” now made him shiver with self-disgust. And these thoughts were juxtaposed with what Joanne had told him about Lana’s childhood. Wordsworth slipped into his thoughts, “Lucy Gray.”
She wondered up and down
And many a hill did Lucy climb
But never reached the town.
Sam reread the letter she’d written and noticed the voice of that letter, the hope in it. I am a person dedicated to honesty and living clean. Each time he read her words, he felt more certain that he’d committed a great transgression, that he had failed in some essential way.
After Lee’s arrest was announced, Joanne seemed to relax a little, tried conversing again, her voice always tinged with relief and guilt over that relief, the idea that she could have suspected he’d do something like that. But when she tried to move back to him, she found Sam still withdrawn, distracted, always paying attention to something else.
They would sit side by side on the couch, and it would be as though they were each afraid of something the other might do. So they looked forward, faces pointed at the TV. Sometimes he wouldn’t come to bed.
One day he asked her which hospital Lana had used to deliver her baby. She told him she didn’t remember, but he was persistent and they were still talking about it while she prepared dinner.
Joanne moved the skillet over a low blue stove flame and brushed her hair back, finally pulling it into a ponytail frayed from the steam. “And I don’t, I really don’t, see why you would want to bring this into our lives. Why would you want to know?” She took a few cloves of garlic off a hanging string, began picking them apart and mincing them with a gleaming butcher’s knife. Hunks of catfish sizzled in the pan.
“It’s just something I feel like I have to know.”
“I don’t see why now.” She put down the knife and talked with antic desperation, her round eyes wide and forlorn. “I mean, things are going so well with us now. I was telling my mom the other day, you know, that I…the way I’ve been thinking about you. You know, I’ve been saying this looks like—what we have—it looks, you know, good. And I don’t know what you even want to know for, if you�
�re the father. I don’t know why you want to do this at all.”
Sam stared across her small breakfast table at the salt and pepper shakers that stood atop a few envelopes, bills.
Joanne turned off the stove and nudged the fish with a spatula. Her tone dropped. “You’re obsessed with her, I say. The way you’re always asking about what she was like when we were growing up. Why would you even want to know?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “It has to do with the truth.”
His voice sounded crisp and clear, which frightened her. Softly, she almost pleaded, “But it’s a truth that can’t do anything for you.”
“I know that. That’s not why it’s important.”
“Then why is it?”
He turned to her wearing no expression, but his jaw clenched in what she took for contempt. “Because it’s the truth.”
When she made herself cry he remained unmoved, and she kept saying she didn’t know why he was doing this to her. Hadn’t they talked about moving in together? Now they barely spoke and he didn’t seem to care.
She talked through dinner, and the dispute ended only when they settled on a date for him to move in, after which Joanne told him the name of the hospital. It was a woman’s hospital called Humana, in Lake Charles, a riverboat town two hours west of Port Salvador.
NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO, WHEN HE’D JUST ARRIVED IN PORT Salvador, Sam had brought a copy of Endymion to the Crescent Moon Café. He was a little drunk and wanted some coffee. The diner was empty except for a waitress sitting at the counter, talking to an old woman behind it. The waitress, a long-boned, slender girl, brought his coffee and some water. Her name tag read, “Lana.”
She pointed to the unopened book on his table. “Is that good?”
He poured sugar into his cup and shrugged. “It’s poetry.” He put his spoon down and saw her face again. “It’s pretty good.”
“I like poetry. I used to read those Silverstein books when I was a kid.” She had high cheekbones and a searching quality in her eyes.
“Oh, yeah. The Giving Tree?”
Her eyes rolled up and to the right. “I think it was something about an attic.” She smiled a brief, pleasant grin, as if to properly close their conversation, and turned away.
He revolved in his chair, trying to think of something to ask her, and his elbow slipped and knocked the steaming coffee into his lap. He yelped, leapt up, grabbed his glass of ice water and dumped it on his jeans.
Lana was standing above him, looking concerned. She handed him a thick, terry cloth towel.
“That was pretty smart,” she said. “Quick thinking to grab the water.”
Abruptly sober, Sam said, “I’ve thought about the situation before. What I’d do.” He wasn’t sure why he’d confessed this, but it was true.
Lana stood beside him while he toweled off and asked, warily, “Did you want more coffee? Or is your night ruined?”
“No, thanks. That woke me right up.” They smiled at each other while he patted himself with the cloth. “How about your night? When do you get out of here?”
She cocked her head as if he’d posed a riddle. “Another hour.”
He handed her the towel and his fingertips brushed her wrist. “Why don’t you let me go home and change and I can come back to get you and we can go for a drink?” He wasn’t typically this bold. The combination of loneliness, sudden sobriety, and the coffee’s hot shock placed him momentarily beyond concerns of pride or fear.
Lana shook her head. “You’re a mess.”
Later that night they’d gone to one of the more-benign taverns in Port Salvador, a sports bar next door to a seafood shack, both buildings resembling large toolsheds. She ordered them two double whiskeys. A jukebox played some of the new country-pop that Sam hated, but with Lana laughing beside him, the music seemed in its right sphere, like everything in the bar, from the names scratched into the stools, to the stuffed alligator perched on the hood of a defunct pinball machine and wrapped in Christmas lights. She mostly grew up in New Orleans, but came to LaCroix to live with relatives when she was younger. She asked him where he was from.
“I was at school in Missouri last year,” he said. “But Connecticut originally.”
“Are your parents there?”
He shook his head. “They both passed in the last couple years. Cancer.”
She apologized but he shrugged it away. She told him that both of her parents were dead too. He lifted his drink and lit a cigarette. When he spoke again, he told her he’d come here to teach. The market was bad because he hadn’t completed his PhD work, but he’d thought his publications would be more helpful than they had been. She asked about his classes, and though he taught five composition courses, he told her instead about Wordsworth and Keats, Coleridge and Blake, Byron, Shelley. They ordered more drinks. He quoted Endymion randomly while running his fingers over hers.
“‘Dead as she was I clung about her waist.’”
“That’s like he couldn’t let go? Like that movie?”
He was drunk and laughed.
At one, they bought a bottle of Jameson’s to go and left the bar. Sam was still amused at the lenient alcohol laws in Louisiana: drive-through daiquiri shops, bars that never closed, liquor available at every type of store. When he would eventually live here with wife and children the prevalence of such spirits would play a major role in maintaining his stability. But back then, he was still in the phase where he was ready to regard Port Salvador as an adventure, a temporary excursion.
Lana lived in a one-bedroom apartment near the junior college, one of the newer complexes that housed mostly students and middle-aged bachelors. She lit the living room with only a black light perched atop the cabinet that held her TV and stereo. Sam was dizzy and taken with her ass—high, firm and narrow—her jeans hanging low, and he’d been delighted to see that she hadn’t marred her sacrum with one of the idiotic tattoos so many girls got there nowadays. He remembered that Leonard Cohen’s low, grating voice had seemed to scrape along the dark edges of the room, like a cat rubbing itself against a wall. She sat on the couch with a mirror and began cutting cocaine while he poured their whiskey.
A number of matted collages decorated her walls, pictures constructed from magazine photographs of faces that had been cut into strips and rearranged. “Those are my pictures,” she said, calling over her shoulder to him. The lines on the mirror were incandescent. The room was an eclipsed world, a place beneath a black sun with deep-voiced monks moaning in the hills.
Of the actual sex, he never remembered much, except the givens of clutching limbs, tentative movements, reading the signs in her eyes. But later, after that had happened, he did always remember that she stood naked before the mirror in her bedroom, staring. Her ass was round and undimpled. She patted her cheeks with her fingertips, lifted her hair up and creased her brow. She made a face. Then another. She stuck her jaw out and grimaced. Then she only stared, fixing on her own eyes in the reflection.
“Do you think…” she spoke in a quiet, dry voice. “Do you think there are places we can only get to by imagining them first? Or does it all have to be a surprise?” She turned to him. “Do you understand? If I imagine a place, does that mean I can’t ever get to it?”
He never answered her. He’d thought she was trying to sound deep.
SAM DROVE TO LAKE CHARLES ON A FRIDAY, IN THE MORNING, without telling Joanne. He’d made an appointment with the chief resident of the maternity ward at Humana Hospital.
Humana was a series of staggered red slabs, at the center of which ran driveways in every direction. Women in wheelchairs held babies, baffled men shuffled about. He followed directions from a receiving nurse, and eventually he was seated in a large office with a high ceiling and a picture window looking out over the pastoral section of lawn to the east of the hospital. The chief resident of the maternity ward was a healthy pink man whose nameplate said, “Alan Richert, MD.” His clipped white hair still covered his head, and his large, square fa
ce had a fresh-scrubbed quality. Stacks of paper cluttered his heavy desk, which he sat behind in a white physician’s coat over a shirt and tie. Sam sunk into one of the two plush leather chairs that faced the desk. The wall opposite the window was covered with diplomas. On the other, a hanging clock with a swinging pendulum ticked the seconds like a metronome.
Dr. Richert in fact remembered Lana. He remembered admiring her attitude. When she was waiting for one examination, he saw her reading a book about child-rearing, her stomach gracefully swollen. He’d asked her what the book’s title referred to and she gave him a long explanation about the necessity of ingraining certain qualities of self-worth in children.
“I remember Lana,” the doctor told Sam. “I don’t deal directly with many patients anymore, and I was very sorry to hear about her.” He tugged his eyeglasses up, then folded his hands on his desk. The office smelled faintly of detergent and pine. “My secretary, Maggie, told me what this was about. But I have to say—”
“I just want to know if you have a sample of the baby’s blood somewhere. You must, right?”
He nodded. “We have readings that show, among other things, the child’s DNA.”
“Thank you. That’s what I want.” Sam leaned closer, propping elbows on his knees. His eyes, bloodshot and dry, quivered atop his unshaven face.
“I understand, Mr. Galt. It isn’t typically our policy to do that. But—”
“But they’re dead,” Sam said. “They’re dead. See? It doesn’t matter to them.”
“I was going to say, but there are unusual circumstances here.”
“Yes. Thank you. When can we do this?”
The doctor sat forward and removed his glasses. He seemed mild and harmless to Sam, a slave of sad duties. “Mr. Galt, I’d like you to consider, just for a moment—” He held his hand up as if to stop Sam from rising. “Consider if this is in fact what you want. Maggie said this wasn’t a religious matter.”
“No. I’m not. I mean, it’s not religious. It’s what I want.”
The doctor frowned. “Technically, you’ll need a court order. A lawyer can get that for you, if you really want it. But you’ll have to go through all that. Ask yourself what this will get you. How will it make you feel, if you learned the child was yours?”
Between Here and the Yellow Sea Page 7
