A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

by John Gregory Brown

  “Very fine, excellent,” he said each time in his strange not-quite-Spanish accent, raising the replenished plastic tumbler toward Henry as if to salute his superb taste.

  Though the store was usually crowded, Tomas served as Henry’s only friend. They would settle into a matching pair of torn corduroy La-Z-Boys at the back of the store, and Tomas would sigh and close his eyes.

  Sometimes Tomas asked Henry about his life. Mostly, though, he talked about his own. He had been a businessman, he said, with one home in San Sebastián and another in Caracas. He had finally come to America in search of his brother, Joaquim, who thirty years earlier had escaped from one of the tyrant Franco’s prisons by curling himself up inside an acoustical speaker, one that belonged to a group of musicians who had been ordered to play at the prison in honor of the Generalissimo’s birthday.

  “As you see, I am no one,” Tomas said, smiling, opening his eyes and raising his tumbler toward Henry. “I am a tuna fish salesman, an old bachelor. But my brother, you must understand, is Joaquim Xabier Otxoa. Say his name in Euskadi, in the Basque Country, and everyone will know. Recite the words Ni ez pertson egokia lan hontarako, and they will tell you that these are the words that begin Joaquim’s first and grandest work, Asmatzailearean Amoranta. They are to us as resonant, if that is the proper term, as your words of ‘Call me Ishmael.’ You understand? But there is behind them a sadness as well, for Joaquim was required to compose these words and all the others that were to follow not in his home, not in his own country, but in his secret exile, his hiding place.”

  Tomas looked up then as if he were confused or as if he only now realized that Henry was there beside him. “How long?” he said. “How long should Joaquim remain hidden?”

  “How long?” Henry asked.

  “For three decades,” Tomas shouted, waving his arms. “For three decades Joaquim is—what? For three decades like a ghost.” And he went on with his story, explaining that throughout these thirty years, his brother had dispatched his manuscripts to his publisher’s office in the Basque Country’s capital of Bilbao not by proper post but by a series of clandestine couriers, many of whom were unaware of the precise nature of their mission. Perhaps they believed they had been entrusted with stolen documents or the blueprints of heavily guarded municipal offices, Tomas said. Perhaps they thought that here were the coded correspondences of the leaders, the so-called terrorists, of ETA, the very plans that would set in motion a spectacular conflagration. Or so his brother might have implied, for who would risk arrest and interrogation, perhaps even torture, in the service of a mere story, an invented tale? “Who would do such as this?” Tomas said, looking at Henry as if he expected an answer, some sort of challenge to the pronouncements he had made.

  Henry remained silent.

  “They would do so for Joaquim,” he said, nodding. “Imagine to be alive at the very time of your greatest artists. Herman Melville. Walt Whitman. Imagine this.”

  “Would we know, though?” Henry said. “Would we recognize them? Would we know they were among us?”

  Tomas nodded. “Perhaps not always,” he said. “But we know.”

  And so day after day Henry simply listened as Tomas wound his way through the story of his brother’s life, which seemed only coincidently his own as well—how as boys they had stood outside in their father’s fields and observed in the night sky the bombs exploding, believing they were merely fireworks announcing the spring festival in Donostia. But their mother had rushed out to call them inside. She was hysterical, weeping, for she had already learned of the previous day’s slaughter in Gernika. Then Tomas’s father joined the Republicans and six months later met his death in the Battle of Teruel, a futile victory that the Fascists soon reversed. Tomas and Joaquim and their mother attempted to tend to the family vineyard, but the grapes mourned his father’s death by turning bitter that first harvest and the next and thus they were forced to leave their village of Getaria so their mother could take a seamstress’s job at a factory in Tolosa. “A small, invisible place, this city of Tolosa,” Tomas said. He looked at Henry, sipped his drink, and shook his head. “For thirty years I spent every waking hour selling tuna fish to the world. It is true, I suppose, that I was more successful than most men in the earning of money, but now I am merely an old bachelor with arthritic knees and a troublesome prostate and a fondness for American jazz and English gin and the red wines of the Rioja.”

  Henry had waited patiently for Tomas to work his way through to his story’s conclusion—whether or not he had found his brother here in America, whether or not they had been reunited. He assumed, of course, that the ending was a sad one, that the tone of weary resignation with which Tomas spoke implied that his brother had never been found or that Tomas had somehow learned that Joaquim had passed away wherever it was he had been hiding. But Henry never heard the story’s end. After about a month of these afternoon visits, Tomas just stopped coming. Henry asked some of the others, those who regularly appeared at the store to sift through the shelves and boxes, if they’d seen Tomas, but they looked back at Henry bewildered, as if they suspected that he had invented this story of the old Basque man with his gin and tonic. For a few weeks, early in the morning and late in the afternoon, Henry would search through the neighborhood for Tomas, walking in circles around Camp and Upperline and Constance and as far south as Tchoupitoulas and then across the train tracks to the loading docks along the river. He suspected, but wasn’t sure, that Tomas might have found some other place—a bar or old record shop or coffeehouse—that seemed more hospitable, somewhere he’d have an audience of more than just one person for his stories.

  The number of people who occupied the store during the day, though, had continued to grow. A few painters and a potter asked what kind of commission Henry wanted to sell their work, and when he told them he didn’t want anything, they came back with the things they’d made and told their friends, who soon showed up with strange watercolor paintings of roadkill and tiny sculptures made from wire coat hangers and Cornell-inspired boxes depicting the Stations of the Cross and a series of hand-printed miniature comic books illustrating the adventures of a pug named Jameson Julius Jehovaseth Jones.

  Henry didn’t have a license or whatever document you needed to run a store, and there was no sign out front except the old Fresh and Friendly neon, for which Henry eventually found the switch, though only the last bit of the sign lit up, the endly part, which seemed exactly right to Henry, and soon he began hearing people calling it Endly’s, as if that were not just the store’s name but his own: Henry Endly, sole proprietor of Endly’s Greatly Used Wares and Whatnots. He figured before long some city official would come by and shut things down, but a few months passed and no one appeared. Henry dragged his mattress to the office in back of the store, and the artists, worried about the safety of their work, set up a schedule for manning the cash register out front, a plastic children’s replica that played one of three tunes when the drawer slid open: “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Shoo Fly” and one that Henry didn’t recognize and that no one else seemed to know either. As the end of summer, when Henry was due to return to Benjamin Franklin High School, approached, Henry called the principal, Paul Kehoe, and told him he wouldn’t be back.

  “What’s going on?” Kehoe asked.

  “I’ve just got my hands full, Paul.”

  Kehoe didn’t even bother to ask what Henry meant. He’d probably heard something from Amy, or maybe he was just happy to no longer have a teacher like Henry to deal with, one who didn’t pay a moment’s attention to the prescribed curriculum, who simply taught whatever he felt like teaching even though it was supposed to be junior-year American lit and not, as Kehoe liked to say, the world according to Henry Garrett. The students, of course, loved Henry’s classes, loved him, mistaking his ineptitude for eccentricity, his disorder for improvisation, his indolence for rebellion. They called him HG instead of Mr. Garrett, and they congregated in the hall outside his office during their f
ree periods so they could listen to the crazy music he always played inside—scratchy LPs of blues or jazz or of the great Amália Rodrigues bemoaning her sad fate or Inés Bacán shrieking through a siguiriya—though playing music was, as Kehoe repeatedly informed Henry, both contrary to policy and inconsiderate to others.

  In the store, as Henry talked to Kehoe, he had turned up the music, made sure Kehoe could hear it on his end of the line before he hung up the phone. And despite Henry’s innate predisposition for ineptitude, rather than floundering, the enterprise that was Endly’s somehow managed not merely to make ends meet but to flourish. The old books found faithful readers, the modest dresses acquired admiring ingénues, the more risqué fashions attracted a willing clientele, and the avant-garde artwork brought in adventurous investors, and thus the money—though it was not at all what Henry had intended—began to roll in, spilling out of the plastic cash register and then being stuffed into tins of empty Community Coffee cans that Henry aligned side by side on a back storeroom shelf.

  The money disappeared, though, almost as quickly as it appeared, especially during the last few days of the month, when the artists raided the coffee cans to pay their rent, and the homeless men concocted disjointed tales of wives and children needing medicine or of on-their-deathbeds mothers in Bogalusa or Grand Coteau whom they wanted to visit or of Chalmette mobsters threatening to break their thumbs or slice off their ring fingers if they didn’t pay some portion of their gambling debts. Henry gave them all what they asked for, as much as he had on hand. When Amy returned from Central America, Henry tried to give her some of the money as well, but she wouldn’t take it, wouldn’t even speak to him, really. Once, he spotted her outside staring in through the windows, her hand shielding her eyes against the glare. He went out there, tried to talk to her, but she crossed her arms and said, “You don’t have any idea how much you’ve hurt me, do you?”

  “I do,” he said. “I do, Amy. It’s just—”

  But she turned and walked away, left him there—helpless, perplexed, in agony. How, for the millionth time, had he been unable to explain what was going on inside his head? He missed her, he did. And he knew that by leaving her he’d lost more than he could ever calculate. And yet…and yet…

  He didn’t know. He couldn’t say. The clatter was ruining him, ruining every thought, slicing every moment into distinct, unconnected fragments.

  When someone from the city’s commercial registrations office finally did walk through the door—Jerome T. Burton, CRO Inspector, it said on his card—Henry wasn’t surprised.

  Henry asked if he’d still need a business license if he simply gave everything away. Mr. Burton made a stern face but allowed that he didn’t really know as he had never been asked such a question; he said he would get back to Henry promptly. “In a week’s time. Five business days,” he added decisively, as if the words were a threat.

  Henry, though, didn’t wait for an answer. He told the artists they could no longer sell their work in the store, and one by one they took away the things they’d made. He put up a sign that told customers they were free to leave with as much as they could carry, and by the end of the week, just about everything was gone. The only item Henry kept, the one thing he’d never agreed to sell, was his father’s bass, a great bronze-bodied Kay that for years had stood untouched in a corner of their dining room, the only place in their house where it wasn’t in the way. It had always felt to Henry like an uninvited guest who arrived each night at dinnertime but wouldn’t sit down and eat. Henry had refused to sell the bass—he’d gotten offers ranging from twenty dollars to two thousand—not so much for sentimental reasons as empirical ones. It was by means of this bass, of his father playing it, that his own undoing had begun, and he thought that maybe one day the instrument might prove necessary—that word again—for him to put himself back together.

  This is what had happened: One night in bed, Amy peacefully asleep beside him, Henry had watched as his father—the ghost of his father, of course, because his father was by then undoubtedly dead—stepped into the room, the bass tucked beneath his arm as if it were no larger or heavier than a violin. Henry continued to watch as his father walked forward, stopped at the foot of the bed, set down the instrument, leaned into it, stretched his hands across the strings, and began to play, humming the melody whose rhythm he sustained with his flattened, callused fingers, the bass pressed against his chest.

  Henry tried to wake up Amy. He called her name, gently shook her shoulder. She stirred but didn’t raise her head. “Listen,” Henry said, and he suddenly recognized what his father was playing. It was a Thelonious Monk tune, “Ask Me Now,” and though Henry tried again and again to get Amy to wake up, she wouldn’t, and when the song was done, his father simply nodded, picked up the bass, and walked out of the bedroom.

  In the morning Henry told Amy what had happened, how he’d tried and tried to wake her. They were still in bed, and Amy propped her head up on her arm. “You were dreaming, Henry,” she said. “It was just a dream.”

  “I know, I know,” Henry said, but the next night he had the same dream, the same visitation, though this time his father played Monk’s “Rhythm-a-Ning,” tearing through it at lightning speed, a virtuosic performance of which Henry was sure his father had been incapable when he was alive. He lay in bed and listened, stunned, until his father finished and then, as he had that first time, simply turned and left the room.

  The dreams continued night after night, each time exactly the same dream except for the Monk tune his father played; “Think of One” one night and “Hackensack” the next and “Blue Monk” after that and then “Ruby, My Dear” and then “Well, You Needn’t.” Finally, the night his father played “ ’Round Midnight,” which was Henry’s favorite Monk tune, maybe his favorite song by anyone ever, Henry somehow knew this would be the end. The song had always seemed to him profoundly solemn, unspeakably sad, as if it were not some smoky and romantic ballad but an elegy lamenting a lover’s death. As his father played it in the dream, agonizingly slowly, it seemed even sadder, an awful, deathlike dirge, some kind of sigh from the heart’s bloody core. And when his father was done, when he picked up the bass and stepped out of the room, Henry understood that this would be the last of these dreams. He wept and wept and woke up still weeping.

  “Find someone, Henry,” Amy had told him. “Just see someone,” she said, pleading, but he couldn’t imagine whom he would see, what he could possibly say. What doctor would understand that he wasn’t looking to have his mind set right, that he longed not for sanity, not for a clear head, not even for relief. What he wanted was resumption. No matter the suffering, no matter the clatter, he wanted the dreams to come back. What else did he have, after all, by which to remember his father? So he wanted the dreams to continue on and on, his father forever playing the bronze-bodied bass, playing this music that was like nothing else except the sad, slow, and necessary—necessary, yes—beating of a heart.

  Three

  WHEN HENRY woke up, it was almost noon.

  So he had slept. That was a good sign. He made coffee now on the bathroom vanity, standing over the small machine as it sputtered and spit, then he took the cup outside and went to retrieve the road atlas from the car. When he’d left New Orleans, he’d sworn he wouldn’t aim for anywhere in particular; he’d be like a wandering troubadour, content to make the highway his home. In those first hours he’d thought of the hurricane as a lucky coincidence, the final nudge he’d needed to truly leave his life behind. Many others on the jammed highway seemed to think so as well, hoisting bottles and beer cans through car windows, happy to feel so alive in the face of the storm. But now, seeing what he’d seen on the TV, Henry understood that there was no luck, no good fortune, in what had happened. New Orleans was underwater. People were dying. People were already dead. He couldn’t go back even if he wanted to. The grocery store and everything in it—his father’s bass, the few other things still there, the junk no one wanted to haul away—
had surely been obliterated.

  He knew, of course, why he’d wound up in Virginia, even if he told himself that it was an accident, that he was just passing through. And he could just pass through. He could keep going, head up to Baltimore to see his sister. Mary hadn’t spoken to him practically since their mother had died, since Henry had skipped the funeral and left Mary to handle the lawyers and the papers even though he was the one still living in New Orleans, twenty minutes from their mother’s house, the house where he and Mary had grown up, where they’d stayed even after their father disappeared. Mary had sent Henry the various documents that required his signature, then she’d sent him the check—more money than he had imagined his mother could possibly have saved—when the estate was settled. It had been signed by a lawyer, but Mary had mailed the check herself. She’d slipped it inside a greeting card with a corny picture of a tropical sunset, but she’d drawn a line through the card’s sentimental message, something about beauty and eternal friendship, and written Fuck you instead. And beneath that, just for good measure, Fuck you, Henry.

  Even so, she would take him in, Henry knew. If he called her, she would take him in. She was the assistant curator at a Baltimore museum, but when she was younger she’d wanted to be an opera singer. And Henry knew if he went to Baltimore, she would first force him to endure a performance worthy of the stage: She would weep and put her arms around him, maybe, but soon enough she’d push him away and hammer her fists against his chest. She’d scream that he was an asshole, a bastard, a complete and total shit—then she’d admit to how desperately relieved she was that he was safe. He imagined her slapping him in the face, but even if she did, he knew that he would, in the end, be forgiven. Maybe she’d laugh through her tears and ask about the Broussards—their own private joke, a neighborhood family Mary had invented—and he’d tell her what she wanted to hear: that the Broussards were of course fine, that they had left just in the nick of time, moments before the levee broke and their house was swept away.