All kinds of adventures. I thought back to my time with Clark. Our trek out west. Where every stop presented new people. Otherworldly languages. Bizarre food and interesting rituals. I could give her adventure, but could a sheltered girl handle it?
I pressed her. “Okay. When you’re playing with the Wonder Twins, and you know you’re supposed to make them do a certain thing, but you don’t know how you know. That’s intuition.”
“My mother says that’s my hyperactive imagination and that I shouldn’t listen to it.”
“Emmaline, your imagination is the most valuable thing you have. It can take you anywhere. Make you anyone. Give you anything you want. Don’t ever, ever stop heeding it.”
She backed away from me and paced the cobbled alley. Her small face worked to comprehend the finer points. My inner voice warned me to let her have her space to ponder her misgivings. I couldn’t blame her, really. She was no pushover, even at the age of nine.
“Will you get money if you take me to my daddy?”
“There’s no money. It’s not that kind of job.”
She stood, aloof. Straight. Nervous hands pressed on her stack of sodden words. I inched toward her.
“You’re a smart girl to be wary of me. But I promise, I won’t hurt you.”
She stopped pacing and watched a spider weave a web between two blooms that sprouted from a potted geranium. The damp soaked through my blue jeans while I tried to read her mind. Her voice was a whisper when she spoke again.
“My mother let me watch television to keep me busy, Mister Merry. I’ve seen what bad men do to children like me. Make them disappear and stuff.”
I creaked to my feet and gritted my teeth against the fire in my knees. “Okay. You tell me. How do you think I knew about your dad?”
“I don’t know. You’re a good guesser? You’ve been watching me?” Her mind whirred. “Wait. I know. You’re one of the men who visits my mother and her ladies. That’s how you knew. It has to be.”
I watched her face and cogitated the meaning behind her words. Imagined who—or what—her mother was, right before she told me. Not in so many words. A nine-year-old girl should never have to say her mother is a prostitute. But, she colored in the picture for me with broken crayons in damaged hues.
In some respects, she was an older soul than me. On the run from police, the very people who were supposed to protect her. No wonder she had trouble trusting me. I watched in dismay as her face crumpled under the weight of her tears. Pavers stabbed my knees when I knelt and folded her into my arms. She clung to me and sobbed a fresh rainstorm on the front of my jacket.
“I don’t want to go back there. Ever. I don’t know what I’ll do, but please don’t make me go back. I’m scared of my mother. That house. Her men.” She shuddered. “I want my daddy. I just want my daddy.”
My eyes burned with tears of my own. I stroked her tangle of hair. “Emmaline. I can’t prove to you that I’m not a bad man. But, I will get you to your father if it costs me my life.” I tilted her chin up to face me. “Let’s make a pact. See that two dollars on the ground over there?”
She nodded, then tiptoed to it. When she picked it up, she held it out to me.
“No, you keep it. Look at the front.” She squinted at the paper. “That man. Do you know who he is?”
“Thomas Jefferson? Wasn’t he our President once?”
“Smart girl. You know your United States history. He used to be one of my heroes. He once said that honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom, and I still hope he believed that.”
She stroked the note with her fingers. “What does that mean?”
“It means that wise people don’t lie, because it’s wisest to be honest. You can’t know this about me, but it’s how I try to live.”
She flung one hand to her hip. Defiant. “Unless you’re lying about telling the truth.”
“I want you to keep that two dollars, Emmaline, as a token of my promise that you’ll see your daddy again. I’ll take you to Nashville, and I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
Exhausted, I fell back on my ass. It felt good to stretch my legs out in front of me, to start up the circulation again. I focused on movement to give her some space to make her decision. Choose her path to navigate. The drum of the rain on the roof filled the silence. A watery clock that punctuated minutes. Dripped seconds.
Tentative, she approached and offered me her right hand. I made my most solemn face and shook it, businesslike. “Mister Merry, I will go with you. I can’t go back where I came from, so it’s time to go on.”
“I only have one condition.” Her warmth ran along the nerves of my arm. Through my shoulder. To my heart.
“What is it?”
“Stop calling me Mister. It’s Merry. Just Merry.” I groaned to my feet. “Now, let’s get going.”
When I took her hand and walked her back toward Bourbon Street, she braked her heels at the doorway and gasped. Transfixed. I followed her gaze through the alley’s opening.
Two men blocked our way. I pushed Emmaline behind me. With the scrawny build on the first one, I knew I could take him. It was the eyes on the second man that stopped me.
I knew those eyes, the empty Nowhere pits within them.
His eyes were just like mine.
The eyes were markers for other Nowhere Men. Where most people’s eyes contained sparklers of life, ours were flat. Dead. Mostly black where color should be.
I’d run into a couple of Nowhere Men. Usually in the bar. Never anyone I knew.
But, I knew him. He was a shade that haunted the trajectory of my life.
His lips stretched out in a smile I well remembered. Almost two hundred years, and even the drawl of his voice was the same. “Well, Merry.”
“Wilkinson? James Wilkinson?”
His chin wagged when he laughed. “Good take on your name. Ironic. But, irony always suited you.”
My thoughts raced back. St. Louis. The last time I saw Wilkinson, he slammed the door of his office—my office—after being replaced as governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory. By me. I took his job.
Or, President Jefferson gave me his job. Didn’t trust Wilkinson. He said he needed someone loyal, someone upstanding, in the position. Someone who’d proven he could deliver results instead of strutting around in service of self.
Wilkinson didn’t take the news well. He had months to sow enmity and destroy my credibility before I got there. While I floundered in my first attempt to publish my expedition journals back east, he excelled at wrecking my chances in the life I was about to enter.
He rewrote my last chapter. Hijacked my reputation. I think he had a hand in killing me.
I always hated him.
He took a step forward. I could smell the stench of cigar on his breath. It crawled along the skin of my face, just like it did the last time I saw him. His finger shook when he pointed at me. “Revenge, Lewis. You killed my wife. Now, I will finally finish you.”
My thoughts reeled with his outlandish accusation, when Emmaline popped from behind me. Yanked at my hand. “Merry, it’s the Judge! He’s the bad man! Run!”
TEN
Meriwether Lewis. I always knew he was here.
A Nowhere Man.
Like me.
Still the self-righteous bastard. Always followed the rules.
The opposite of me.
I’d been in Nowhere for almost two hundred years. Several stints. That whole business about recovering my good name, ensuring my immortal place in history? Bullshit. I skipped out on my last assignment and built the life I always wanted. Right here. In between the margins. Where power could be my heavenly reward.
I constructed my empire and looked for the spirit of my wife. My Ann. I always knew she was here somewhere. That she was housed in the body of a little girl was something I couldn’t he
lp.
‘Find me again.’
She whispered it through bloody teeth, her lungs rotted by tuberculosis. It got worse after we were forced out of St. Louis. She couldn’t last in the Natchez heat.
All because of that damn Lewis.
In a way, I was glad he had her. Obliterating him would give my reunion with Ann another edge. It was like a bonus.
I thought back to the blue tinge on that nun’s face. Her thick tongue and bloodshot eyes. That croaking sound she made when her soul gave up and floated away.
Violence always made sex a shivering rhapsody of desire.
ELEVEN
“Get them. Don’t shoot the girl.” I looked back to see the Judge duck into the street and evaporate into the swirl of humanity, while his sidekick started after us.
Emmaline bolted down a tunnel that led from the back of the courtyard, dragging me behind her. The crash of a wooden door rang through the footfalls of pursuit. She turned left at a T junction that led us into cavelike dark, morbid and damp. I breathed through the sensation of being suffocated by the intense weight of it. My knee grazed a sharp corner. A chain reaction of toppled yard furniture or ironwork.
Blind, I reached through the nothing in front of me and felt Emmaline’s snarled hair.
“Know where we’re going?”
Her voice bounced back to me. “Dead end. Up ahead. Almost there.”
“Dead end? How’s that going to get us out of here?”
“We can climb the wall. I’ve done it before.”
A crash of metal and a cry of pain echoed through the alley. Whatever I knocked over, it was a only temporary roadblock for the Judge’s henchman.
Wilkinson, of all people.
His shadow haunted every hour of my tenure in office. He used his connections in Washington to lobby for shifting trade rules. Less money for the territory. Spread rumors that I was a drunk. He even made mortifying insinuations about my friendship with Clark. He hounded me until the night I died, with one of his men just outside.
Or was he? I couldn’t remember.
Steel scraped on stone, and the beat of footsteps resumed. The weak beam of a flashlight snaked around a corner.
“Hurry, Emmaline. We almost there?”
In answer, she dragged me through a narrow opening, a break between two buildings. Light streamed like whitewater falling through a crack. Emmaline wrapped her hands around the gutter and scaled the brick-and-stucco corner to the top of a wooden fence. She mouthed the words follow me before dropping over the side.
I had one shot to get over the fence before they’d be on me. Maybe. Easier said than done, with my sore legs and banged-up knee. I grabbed the drainpipe and hoisted myself along the wet wall. My shoes slipped. No traction. I used all the strength in my arms to pull myself up, but the opening where Emmaline disappeared was a tight squeeze. I leaned forward and put my chest flat, ready to push off the wall with my legs and dive head first into the other side of the unknown.
“Stop right there.”
Eyes squinted up at me through the line of light in his hand. The beam shuddered as he panted. In his other fist, the round silencer at the end of a pistol was trained up at me. I hung there, suspended, a human bulls-eye.
“Reach over that wall. Pull the girl back over.” The man jerked his gun hand through the beam of light to make sure I saw it. Static blared from a box. He pulled it in front of his mouth. “Yeah. I got ‘em. You can go on back to your house and wait. Over.”
I glanced over the wall. Emmaline looked up at me, her dress torn at the hem. Her right knee was slick with blood. Details I wished to remember in case I woke up in the bar, a publican for all time.
I could wish, but I knew I would never remember.
She motioned to me. “Just fall, Merry. It’s not far.”
I closed my eyes and inched my body over the divide. Steel ground on steel. A silenced click tore through me. Sent me over the wall in a free fall. The impact knocked the wind out of me. I realized I was still breathing when I bounced on asphalt.
Emmaline ran over and tugged on my jacket, trying to pull me to my feet. “Get up. Hurry.”
I fought to breathe and ran my fingers over my chest, before shoving them inside my denim shirt. I felt a clear sheen on my skin. Sweat. Nothing more.
Head pounding, I pulled myself to my knees and crawled for cover along the back of one of the buildings, her in tow. The crooked cop was still in the alley, cursing and scratching at the barrier. When he fired a couple of bullets, they broke through and whizzed into empty space. Rounds of light and a rush of breath.
“I’m not hit, Emmaline. Bastard missed.”
“He’s trying to climb the fence.”
“That sack of skin-and-bones can’t climb a fence.”
“Are you sure?”
I nudged her back. “Come on. The Judge might have other people out here looking for you.”
Wide-eyed, Emmaline scanned the parking lot where three cars sat cold under a single floodlight. “Can you get one of those cars started, Merry?”
I eyed the machines. Mystical devices that replaced the grit of human effort. I might’ve learned to drive on a different assignment, but every Nowhere experience was new. I started every job with the tools I had in life.
They didn’t include driving.
“I’m not so great with cars.” I studied the rest of the space. Uneven brick. An iron porch or two. A blank hole, recessed into a wall. “What about that opening there? Other side of the lot. Where does that go?”
Her lips moved along her mental city map. “It comes out at the end. Close to the Cathedral.”
“Can we get to the river from there?”
Scratches drifted over the fence, and a thud rattled the wooden slats. The man shouted orders through the static on the handheld radio. I couldn’t hear who answered.
“We don’t have much time. Can we get to the river? Think, Emmaline.”
She chewed her lip. Nodded. “We can run along the side of the big square. It comes out at Café du Monde. Daddy used to take me there.”
I nudged her in the direction of the arched doorway, dragging myself to a run behind her. “Get us out of here.”
When I made to follow her, I was blinded by brick shrapnel. Tasted blood. Another shot, followed by more staccato footsteps and another voice.
“Quit shooting! The Judge wants the girl alive.”
I ignored the rest and kept moving, forced my body between the possibility of more gunfire and Emmaline’s bouncing curls. Kept my eye on an arch of light at the far end of the alley. Emmaline tugged at an iron gate, and we pushed into a circle of party girls on the sidewalk. Sequins every place. Their sparkle blocked my view of Emmaline. “Watch the dress, jerk!” One of them slurred.
I forged ahead, fighting to keep Emmaline’s head in my sights. She weaved through the people on the sidewalk with the advantage of size and a low center of gravity while I bumped and shoved, clumsy.
“Stop that man!” A gravelly voice shouted. From a side street, another uniform sprang into the sidewalk, eyes locked on me.
I pushed around a teenage boy and sprinted along the iron fence at Jackson Square, lungs burning. The awning at Café du Monde glowed green and white up ahead, people swarming underneath. Vultures, hungry for white powder and fried dough.
Where the iron fence gave out, Emmaline hung a sharp right and disappeared. I closed the few steps and rounded the fence just in time to see Emmaline tear through traffic to a wall on the other side of the street.
The levee. It had to be.
Car horns blared as I plowed through headlights to the other side of the road and crawled up the grade to the top of the levee. Emmaline waited there, bent over with her hands on her knees, panting hard. Across the street, our two pursuers dove into traffic. I nudged her. “Move it. Now.”
I forced my agonized legs into another run, pulling Emmaline with me.
The levee was a series of barriers that held back the river. Dark warehouses. Smokestacks. Railroad tracks. The Mississippi slipped into nothing around a sharp bend. I stopped and scanned the docks, seeking any kind of boat to steal. Empty water lapped against the levee, holding nothing that would float.
“Last call for the Cotton Blossom! See New Orleans at night!” A voice cracked over a loudspeaker. Close. I pushed toward the sound, through industrial canyons and the stink of engine oil, my heartbeat a thud in my ears.
Lights along the levee lit up whirlpools of muddy water. A horn sounded, low and long. In front of us, a steamboat was anchored. Its red wheel turned, ready to depart. I took Emmaline’s hand and ran toward it.
The Cotton Blossom. A ticket taker was closing his window underneath that sign. I stopped in front and knocked on the glass. The man ignored me, intent on shuttering his space.
I looked over my shoulder. The uniformed goons advanced down the embankment. In less than a minute, they’d be upon us. I pushed my desperation aside and mustered a weary smile. Tried to catch the man’s eye. “Bend the rules a little? I promised my daughter we’d have a ride tonight. She’s got her heart set on it, but her fool mother didn’t bring her over to my place on time.”
He looked me over through the glass, hard-like. Emmaline shook her dripping head and flashed a shy smile. He leaned on the counter and sighed. Softened. He pulled out two tickets and pushed them toward us. “Ride’s on me. Hurry. It’s leaving any second now.”
“Thanks, Mister!” Emmaline called. We ran up the metal ramp to the entrance of the boat. Somebody shouted over the jazz band tuning up on deck. A steward moved a bar aside to let us on board.
“Welcome to the Cotton Blossom. May I punch your ticket?”
I handed the man two tickets and scooted us into the jeweled crowd on deck. One last look at land, and I spotted Wilkinson’s men following us up the ramp. They leapt over the gap the boat left when it pulled away.
To Live Forever: An Afterlife Journey of Meriwether Lewis Page 5
