I had taken that southbound train myself once. Close to two decades ago. I had gone to New Orleans.
A diesel engine jolted into life and I jumped. The graffiti-spattered line of freight cars jostled together in a loud staggered cacophony of cracks, an undulating sequence of rapid reports, and the freight train began to grind its serpentine way slowly southward.
I took it as a sign that I should leave too.
I started the engine and pulled away slowly. No one entered or left the coffee shop as I watched in the rearview mirror. My intention was to drive a little way north heading towards the next entrance onto the highway going west, making myself think only about the day’s driving. Perhaps I would stop for some lunch later, in Iowa, and by the end of the day I would be in Lincoln, Nebraska.
There was a sign up ahead for I-80 West.
Think about the drive.
Don’t think about the scream.
A billboard sign promised me an EZ car title loan. A handsome lawyer with a slick smile and his shirt sleeves rolled up for business would get me a big check pronto for my job-related accident.
I wasn’t interested in either a loan or a big check.
Why had she screamed?
The young man had stood up. He had taken his backpack with him into the bathroom. He had carried it instead of putting it over his shoulder. He had picked up his coffee cup. It had presumably been empty. He had put it back down.
He had left his computer on the table. Most of the customers in the café had cell phones sitting on their tables. Did he have one? I thought not. The drive and the headphones had still been attached to the computer. The television show had still been running.
What was on the drive?
The scream kept replaying in my head as I drove away. It was distracting enough that I almost missed the unexpected left turn onto the highway heading west towards home.
Four
I drove for the next three hours without stopping. I endeavored not to think about anything but driving.
Internet service was being offered at each rest stop and it was a temptation, but rather than stop and satisfy my curiosity, I made myself keep on going, heading almost due west, crossing high over the Mississippi River at the Iowa border, and a few minutes later exiting into a pretty riverside town. Three short blocks later, I found the bar right where Google Maps had assured me it would be.
I had generously promised myself a beer with my lunch as some kind of fictitious reward. They made their own. I opted for a stout and ordered a late lunch of homemade shepherd’s pie.
There were three other customers positioned equidistant from each other along the high-gloss length of the bar. I sat instead at the window and looked out onto the street across the empty red dirt parking lot that sloped all the way down to the river. High overhead, I could see the arches of the bridge I had just crossed. Three wooden park benches on a footpath followed the topography of the riverbank and were placed strategically amidst tall grass arrangements that the town had artfully placed along that stretch of water.
The flash drive I had taken from the coffee shop was still in my pocket. My laptop was on the table, fired up and ready. The Wi-Fi password was written on a blackboard behind the bar. I was hungry. My food hadn’t arrived yet. As soon as I started on the beer, I badly wanted another, but I had a long way still to go before my day would come to an end.
A woman had screamed in a coffee shop in a small town over three hours ago. So what? It would hardly merit a breaking news segment in the online version of the New York Times, but it might have generated a mention somewhere, deep in the vast minutiae of cyberspace. My first and best guess was a hometown news Patch, where the good people regularly posted on matters of mostly local and lurid interest, with neighborhood crimes being a reliable opportunity for considerable electronic hand-wringing.
Within minutes I was proven right. A witness in the coffee shop had already breathlessly posted and, setting aside the copious exclamation marks, I learned that a young man had apparently knelt down on the clean bathroom floor, cut open his wrists, cleverly placed his hands under the cold water in the toilet bowl, and proceeded to bleed very tidily to death.
The last part was admittedly a matter of some speculation. The eager witness had noted that the body looked quite dead. The two servers who had finally managed to get the bathroom door open had seemingly commented on the deep red color of the water, which to them strongly hinted at a massive and life-extinguishing blood loss. The poster also mentioned that the hands had been milk white, and that there had been no blood dripping down onto the clean floor as the victim had been removed from the scene at a leisurely pace by the paramedics. This decided lack of blood and haste in the removal of the body indicated that the young man was already dead. The witness went on to list other random observations. A knife had been removed by the paramedics, who had also thought to pick up the dead man’s backpack. The two police officers who had arrived shortly after the paramedics, had commandeered both items.
The witness strongly believed the death to be a suicide, and there seemed little sense in debating the point with her, unless breaking into a locked coffee shop restroom and escaping unseen afterward was an even remotely likely scenario for a murder. I had been to the coffee shop several times before. There was no window in the bathroom, and no other means to get in or out.
I finished reading through the rest of the Patch as my lunch arrived. The shepherd’s pie came with cheddar cheese cooked into the mashed potatoes on top. It should have been delicious. It wasn’t. I swallowed the first bite all but untasted. I was asked if I wanted another beer. I did, but I resolutely declined.
There were several related comments posted, which expressed a predictable smorgasbord of sorrow and outrage, mostly sorrow at not being there themselves, and outrage that the poster was not delivering a pre-cathartic deluge of repugnant revelations of a more graphic nature. A singular comment near the end essayed a kindlier tone, oddly sympathizing not with the dead young man, but with the “poor soul” who had posted the initial link.
“So very sorry you had to see that.” The comment earnestly concluded, albeit unnecessarily, as it was quite obvious that the witness was close to wetting herself with ill-suppressed glee at her good timing, and at her being at the scene of something so hideously pleasurable as an unexpected and unexpectedly gory death scene.
The urge to get all self-righteous in the unseemly face of the macabre was a strong one. But I resisted. I was breathlessly reading this stuff after all. And I had pocketed the flash drive.
Speaking of which, in my reading of the Patch posting, I had looked for any reference to my theft and was relieved to see nothing mentioned.
The question was: Why had I taken it?
Was it an impulsive act or a twinkling of intuition?
Had I somehow sensed that a bad ending was imminent?
I plugged in the flash drive and I waited. There were only two files saved to the drive and I opened the first.
It was a short text file and it loaded quickly. The file was named kindsister. It was a biography of an English actress, and the style and content felt a whole lot like a Wikipedia entry. Her name was Margot Kind. There was a birthdate in early December of 1945. No date of death was recorded. Her parents had been schoolteachers and were both dead. A younger brother, Logan Kind, was a singer and he was also deceased. There was a separate link to him. Margot Kind was a mother with a child of her own, a daughter, Tracy, born in 1975. Margot had been married once and was now divorced. She had attended university in Newcastle in the North of England and a drama school in London after going to a fancy boarding school for rich girls in the Borders of Scotland, where her mother had been the deputy headmistress. Her acting credits were listed chronologically, and I noticed in passing a theater production from the Fringe. That was near the end. The later listings were mostly plays. Earlier she had
several television credits. None of the program names were familiar. The first ones had specific dates in 1972, 1973, and 1974. I guessed they were one-off guest spots on television shows. They were all from British shows. The longest citation was for a science fiction series called Project Europa that ran from 1976 to 1979. Margot played a character named Ceres. There was a picture posted of her in the part.
The purple-fringed hair and the tight metallic outfit were instantly familiar.
Her last role was in a revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives. It was in 2011. It was a small part. She would have been seventy-one years old at that time.
I closed the file and continued sitting.
* * *
A barge appeared on the river moving inexorably upstream. A gull picked frantically at a piece of food in the far corner of the parking lot. The waitress smiled at me and asked again if I wanted anything else. I asked her for the check. She looked at my plate and asked if I needed a box. I declined her kind offer.
When the bill arrived, I noticed that my drink was half price.
I paid and left and walked across the red dirt lot to the river. The gull continued to eat, tearing into a big piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken with a carefree nonchalance.
It was warm at the riverbank. I sat down on the nearest bench. When I opened up the laptop I discovered that the Wi-Fi was still connected.
The traffic moved high over the bridge with a low persistent rumble.
The second file was much briefer. It was also a text file and was titled kindsongs. I read the handful of words. They appeared on the screen as follows:
Circumstance is The Town Where She Loved Me.
Like It Never Rained is Pittenweem Girl.
LOOK FOR MORE
What should I do now?
I picked the most singular of the typed phrases and googled Pittenweem Girl. I got several hits. Pittenweem was a small fishing village on the east coast of Scotland with a population of 1,600. I already knew that. Well, I knew where it was, at least.
Of more interest was the fact that “Pittenweem Girl” was a song by a folk singer named Logan Kind. I already knew who Logan was. He was the actress Margot Kind’s younger brother.
YouTube provided a version that had several hundred hits and was accompanied by a repeating series of a half dozen still photographs. The singer was tall and thin and sported a white collarless shirt in most of the pictures. He held an acoustic guitar, an older Guild model. It was around his neck as he sat by a lake on a large flat rock and tried to summon a smile for the camera but mostly failed. In another picture he sung into a microphone on a small stage. In a third he leaned on a mossy wall with a handful of sheep behind him looking bored and soggy in the misty mountain rain.
The song itself was an amazingly fine one. He fingerpicked fluidly and beautifully. The recording was simply arranged: his vocals, a solo guitar, and a string quartet heavy on cello. His voice was breathless and soft and reverb-free. He enunciated each word perfectly. I listened all the way through in a trance.
On Amazon “Pittenweem Girl” was listed as one of nine tracks on the album Crofter, recorded by Logan Kind. I noticed that “The Town Where She Loved Me” was another cut, and that the photo of the lake and the rock and the singer was the cover of the album. There were only a handful of reviews but they were all positive, mostly very positive, and several were downright rapturous. On YouTube, the viewer comments were equally euphoric. I scrolled quickly down.
Somewhere in the middle of the reviews a gentleman named BiggieIke posted that, in his far-from-humble opinion, the song “Like It Never Rained” by the piece-of-worthless-shit Deltatones was pretty much the same song as “Pittenweem Girl,” which was, IHHO, a true fucking masterpiece. WTF? was BiggieIke’s succinct response to this dubious coincidence.
I found another review that took Biggie’s side.
Then I found a Deltatones fan who responded to Biggie by calling him a large fucking douchebag.
I dutifully investigated further. The Deltatones had a much larger video budget. For “Like It Never Rained” they carefully lip-synced their song on the banks of a cypress river that looked misty and swamplike and amply southern Gothic, which the black-and-white cinematography garishly accentuated. There were four burly wispy-bearded plaid-wearing gentlemen on guitar, bass, drums, and banjo, with a nymphlike female accordion and fiddle player in tow. About four thousand had viewed the song so far and most of them seemed largely content.
I listened hard to the Deltatones then I went back to “Pittenweem Girl” and listened to that again. “Like It Never Rained” was louder and faster and the words were mostly different. But there was definitely something there. It was similar but not too similar, as if a pattern of minor chords had been transposed onto major ones. In addition, Kind’s blistering flurry of sustaining hammer-ons had been replaced with rolling banjo notes. But in all honesty, without BiggieIke’s suggestion, I wasn’t sure I would have spotted the similarity. I did know that Logan Kind was a better musician than all the Deltatones combined. He was in truth as amazing a guitarist as I had ever heard. As I listened to the Deltatones I could begin to figure out the chords to the song. If I listened to “Pittenweem Girl” a million times I couldn’t begin to know how to play it. For one reason, I couldn’t fingerpick that quickly if I grew five more fingers on both hands and my life depended on it. And for another, Logan Kind wasn’t tuning his guitar in any way I could recognize.
And back to Amazon. The Deltatones had only made three albums in fifteen years. None of their recorded songs were named “Circumstance.” They were a bar band based in Oxford, Mississippi, and they were painfully anxious to be my friend on Facebook. I resisted their kind offer.
Instead I purchased Crofter as an MP3, and while I waited for my purchase to download, I reopened Margot Kind’s short biography and clicked on a link to her dead brother.
* * *
His full name was Logan Alexander Kind and his biography was far shorter than his sister’s. He was born in 1949 in the far North of England. He attended primary and secondary school and, according to his teachers, failed to fully realize his potential in both institutions, although his swimming coaches had nothing but lavish praise for him. His father sang in the choir and his mother played the organ in a local church. He had the one sister. He was a folksinger who had recorded just the once. His early career was mostly busking and begging on the streets of Glasgow, on Briar Road, outside the student bars and used record stores, near the university, at the start of the seventies, after briefly attending, but not actually graduating from, the city’s biggest and most prestigious college. Kind played for years in small clubs all over the North of England and Scotland. In 1973 the album Crofter was released on a small record label. Logan gigged behind it for the next few years but declined interviews and most forms of publicity. This was all before the days of cell phones, and no one thought to record any of his performances.
After that Logan Kind pretty much disappeared for a while.
He worked as a gardener and gave swimming lessons and he lived mostly by himself, first in the North of England, and than later in a remote village in the Fens much further south, where he walked his dog along the flat mud paths that stretched between the marshes; tenuous links between expanses of land that were flat and treacherously porous. He was married for a short time when he lived in the north. He had a child who was subsequently given up for adoption. He enrolled in Open University classes in the south. He used the local library branch and never once had an overdue book.
And he never quite completely went away.
Logan Kind became a minor legend. Crofter was a record that other guitarists tended to discover on a regular basis, and other players would lovingly reference Logan as a seminal influence.
In 1998 he left Britain for a proposed tour of America that one of his earnest musician fans had talked him into doi
ng; this was a tour that never actually took place. He lived anonymously for a year or so in Oxford, Mississippi. Then he moved to New Orleans in 2000 and lived there until 2006. He had been fifty-seven when he died, a suspected suicide, his skinny body pulled lifeless from the Mississippi waters. He was survived by the aforementioned actress sister, and by a former wife, whom he was married to for two years in the late seventies and who subsequently died. She was not named in the article. Neither was their offspring, yet strangely the last name of the family who adopted the child was provided.
I reviewed the facts as presented thus far. I thought about the principal participants and I created a rough chronology. There were considerable gaps.
A young man had killed himself today. A folksinger had apparently killed himself eight years ago. The folksinger’s sister was an actress in a British television show the young man was watching right before he died. Ike on the Internet thought a band from Oxford, Mississippi, had ripped the folksinger off and the young man on the coffee shop bathroom floor had appeared to agree with Ike before he died. The folksinger had lived in Oxford. I had never been to Oxford. It was in the northern part of the state, an hour or so from Memphis where I had been. There was a big southern football college in Oxford. The writer William Faulkner had famously lived there. I had been too intimidated to ever try reading him.
I recalled that at the end of his life the author had worked on a screenplay for a Raymond Chandler novel that had been made into a Humphrey Bogart movie.
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