“This is supposed to be the Weather Channel,” Henry once pointed out when he spotted a vexed reporter crouching amid the overturned shelves of a grocery store in California, encircled by dented cans and shattered jars. “Earthquakes aren’t weather, are they?”
“They cause weather,” Amy said matter-of-factly without taking her eyes from the screen, refusing to be distracted. But then she turned, smiled, and said, “You really don’t know anything, do you?”
“I don’t,” he confessed yet again—how many times would he have to say it?—but now he knew she wasn’t listening. She was watching the somber reporter poking his microphone through the rubble as though the dented cans and shattered bottles might miraculously begin to recount their evening of terror for the camera. “I don’t know anything,” he’d said.
Now he lay staring at the motel’s ceiling. Why didn’t he know anything? Why didn’t anything except the random and inconsequential stick in his head? How was it that he remembered, word for word, the stories of an old man drinking gin and tonic in a run-down grocery store but not the things that mattered, the things that had happened to him, that had shaped his life, his one fuckup after another? He tried again to remember what he’d told Amy about buying the Fresh and Friendly, about why he’d moved out, about what he believed was wrong with his life, with their life together. But he could not reconstruct these conversations, could not remember a single thing he’d said. Instead, he remembered the way Amy pinched salt from a bowl when she was cooking, the imprint her heels left in her shoes, the crescent-shaped scar above her right knee, the red speck he’d once noticed in her left eye, at the edge of the iris, something she’d never noticed herself. He remembered the graceful arc of Pistol Pete Maravich’s shots, his sagging gray socks, his jaw cocked to the side in concentration, the swan’s neck his arm formed as the ball peeled off his fingertips; he remembered Mary singing in her bedroom, late one night, an Italian aria so beautiful he was sure that he understood the words, that he knew the story: a maiden’s lament for a lover gone off to war and likely never to return. He remembered the ragged, uneven cuffs on his father’s gray wool pants, the fancy script on the packs of Chesterfield he smoked, a girl named Elise whom Henry had slept with in college who had laughed derisively when she realized he hadn’t taken off his socks (white tube socks with three red stripes at the top). He remembered old phone numbers; the taste of a high-school friend’s mother’s jambalaya; Melvin the butcher, lanky and slope-shouldered, wiping his hands on his apron and, looking past Henry to the blue sky outside the window, glumly declaring, “It’ll probably go and rain tomorrow.”
And the girl. Here was the girl’s voice—no, not her voice but someone else’s, someone speaking to him. Clarissa Nash learned the peculiar entanglement of love and disappearance the summer she turned twelve. Was this from a book he’d once read? Was that all it was, all she was—a character from a book?
He remembered Amy stepping out of the shower, her skin scalded pig’s-ass pink, as she’d once called it, steam rising from her shoulders and breasts, hair wild and tangled, knotted and roped. He’d wanted to screw her then, had wanted to screw her every time he saw her naked or his hand happened to fall against her bare hip when he rolled over in bed or he spotted her pulling a stocking up her leg as she sat on the low pillow chair by the bed. She looked like a French model casually posing for erotic photographs that seductively imitated ordinary domestic life.
Oh God. What an idiot he was to have given up this life. He was a numskull, a blockhead, a dunderbutt, a jackass, and he remembered Amy once lying in bed and compiling a hilarious list of all the names for penises, prodding him to do the same for—pointing between her legs—“here,” she’d said, spreading her legs. “This.”
He wouldn’t.
“Come on!” she’d said, pinching him, making him swat her hand away again and again, the two of them rolling around on the bed. “Jackhammer,” she said in a breathy whisper, her ridiculous imitation of seduction. “Cock,” she said, running her tongue along her lips, “tallywhacker. Instrument”—she was laughing now, shouting—“dong, tool, rod, pole, prick!” And he held her arms as she squirmed beneath him, panting.
He pressed his weight down on her, pinned her legs, made her keep still. “Cunt?” she whispered into his ear. “Pussy? Snatch? Come on, Henry. Please.”
Had he heard it even then, when he was making love to Amy, fucking her? Had he heard his own voice speaking the name? It was his own voice, wasn’t it? Clarissa Nash, it had said, Clarissa Nash, as if he were summoning this girl, as if he were not simply recounting her life but speaking it into being. His voice: Everything Clarissa Nash knew emerged from the books she endlessly, passionately read: stories of orphans with inexplicable, nearly olive complexions, too dark for beauty; curly-haired and bone-thin waifs who were smart enough to know they deserved a kinder fate. That must have been it, just some book he’d once read, some cheap trashy paperback, or worse—something highbrow, something literary, something he’d come across in graduate school? Was he rummaging through his own head, leaching another pointless memory from his brain, simply to come up with a woman—this woman—to imagine, with her schoolgirl breasts and peppermint smile, a low-rent version of Lolita—no, not to just imagine, of course. To imagine fucking.
Oh God. It was all so pathetic. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t shut down his despair, his disgust, his desire. He finally got up and tried to open the room’s windows, but they were sealed shut. He got back into bed, where he drifted in and out of sleep, plagued by his utterly predictable dreams of wandering and dislocation, climbing winding narrow stairways of crumbling stone in a gloomy Spanish cathedral only to find himself again and again in the cathedral’s dank crypt; hacking his way through a verdant forest filled with the stench of rotten fruit, the ground covered with a thick muck of bananas and mangoes and papayas; clinging to the listing prow of a sinking ship, the figurehead carved, like a garish Mardi Gras float, into the form of the elephant god Ganesh, the waves swelling again and again over his head, the roofs of houses bobbing up out of the water all around him. On one of these roofs sat Bob Dylan, black boot heels anchored against the shingles—and even in the midst of this dream Henry felt the urge to laugh at how idiotic it had all become, with the elephant-head prow and Dylan strumming a guitar, singing in his nasally whine Skip James’s “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.”
Henry couldn’t hear him, though. He couldn’t hear anything. The monotonous voice that had accompanied these dreams was gone, replaced by an equally suffocating silence, and he found himself behind the wheel of his car, driving for hours and hours along some barren stretch of highway, unable to find a place to pull over but so tired he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Then the old man, the prisoner with the frazzled gray hair and beard, appeared out of nowhere, standing with outstretched arms directly in front of his car. And now there was sound, as if a switch had been turned on: he heard the awful thud of impact and the old man’s piercing, anguished scream and then his final groaning breath, blood bubbling from the corner of his mouth, spilling a jagged line down his chin and through his beard and along his throat until it had soaked his shirt. Enough, he heard someone say, a woman’s voice, and the word began to echo as though it had become an incantation, the one voice multiplying into a dozen voices, a thousand, too many to count, though he could hear Amy’s voice and Latangi’s among the chorus and then his mother’s voice and Mary’s and then the girl’s, of course, Clarissa Nash’s, a child’s voice, taunting, playful, seductive—but he didn’t want to hear it. A man is dead, he said, and he said it over and over again until he managed to tear himself from the dream, make himself wake up.
He sat up in bed, panicked, still drenched in sweat. He was certain that when the sheriff arrived this morning he would tell Henry that he’d changed his mind, that he’d examined the evidence and found that Henry had been responsible after all, that he would have to be charged with the old man’s murder. Whose murder? Henry
thought, and he realized that he did not know, had not even asked, the old man’s name. They must have told him, must have given Henry the man’s name, but he couldn’t remember it. He needed to call someone—Mary or Amy, it didn’t matter. He needed to call someone and say, I’m here. I’m alone. A man is dead. I don’t even know his name.
He didn’t have a phone, though; he looked at the nightstand next to the bed. There wasn’t a phone there. Didn’t every motel, no matter how run down or lousy, have phones in the rooms? Wasn’t there some law or regulation that required them for public safety? Or maybe he was the only person left in the world who didn’t have a cell phone, who had never had one. He needed money, needed cash, but all he had left in his wallet were a couple of twenties and a few singles. No ATM card, no Visa or MasterCard or American Express—he’d gotten rid of them all when he moved out, one more idiotic step in his insane, relentless purging. He still had a checkbook, but that was in the glove compartment of his car, and his car was gone, towed away. What in the hell was he going to do? He needed to get out of this fucked-up, cheap-shit, no-phone motel, out of Virginia.
He heard something outside, someone, and looked at the clock. It was just past eight a.m.; he had less than thirty minutes before the sheriff showed up. He got up and looked out the window but didn’t see anything except a man standing by a pickup truck in the parking lot. The man was stroking the dirty, matted black dog sitting in the truck’s bed. When Henry opened the door to his room, though, he saw that Latangi had left some food there for him, a blue-gray school-cafeteria lunch tray with a basket of rolls and a pot of tea wrapped in a lace cloth and a bowl of strawberries.
He carried the tray inside, ate a couple of the strawberries, sipped the tea, then took a shower. He remembered the key Latangi had given him, the story she’d told about her husband’s poems. What did she expect of him? What was she hoping he would do or say? He assumed that the poems would be terrible, a lonely life spilled onto the page in the form of sentimental couplets or quatrains or whatever the Indian equivalent happened to be. Was it ghazals? Was that the name? He couldn’t remember. Through the years people had asked him again and again to read the things they had written, their stories and poems and novels; he’d been asked by his students, by his students’ parents, by doctors and car mechanics and barbers and social workers, all of it irredeemably, unspeakably bad—all except for the work of a stocky UPS deliveryman named Karl Palmer whom Henry had gotten to know simply from signing for the endless packages and correspondence Amy received from her publisher. Karl had written a bunch of stories, he explained, based on the people he’d met driving his route, an idea so singularly unpromising that it had taken Henry more than a month to summon the energy to even glance at the bulky manuscript Karl had handed over. He’d wound up, though, absolutely stunned by what he read, by the simple, quiet beauty of Karl’s writing, by the way he managed to convey the longings and failures and triumphs of his characters through their smallest gestures—how they held open doors or knelt in their gardens or spoke to their pets or brushed aside gray wisps of hair from their eyes. Each of the stories revolved around the character getting something in the mail—a letter dispatched years earlier, a grown daughter’s sweater in need of repair, a postcard without a signature, a shortwave radio shipped back from Vietnam, an invitation to a granddaughter’s wedding. He’d told Karl how wonderful the stories were, how much they deserved to be read. He said he’d ask Amy to send them to someone at her publisher, see if anyone there liked them as much as he did. “I don’t know,” Karl had answered, taking the manuscript back from Henry and holding it against his chest as if he feared Henry would try to steal it. “I think I’ll work on them some more, maybe write a few new ones.” A couple of weeks later he quit his job or was transferred, and though Henry was certain that one day he’d come across Karl’s stories in a bookstore, he never had.
Sometimes it seemed to Henry that everyone he met wanted to be a writer, and they all seemed to imagine that he too was secretly waiting to have his work discovered. But he had never wanted to be a writer; he could imagine no worse fate than the writer’s ceaseless struggle for eloquence, for originality and cleverness and insight and grace. These were, it seemed to him, precisely the qualities he lacked: eloquence, insight, and grace. There had been only a few moments in all his years of teaching when, by sheer accident, in the midst of a rambling sermon on Whitman’s “Song of Myself” or during a dissection of the final paragraphs of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening—Edna Pontellier stepping into the water to drown herself, the broken-winged bird falling from the sky—he had managed a kind of transcendent brilliance, as if an electric current were running through his body, spilling forth from him with every word he uttered, his students somehow aware that he was approaching some dangerous, fantastic revelation.
He never actually got there, though, never found for himself or provided his students with some final moment of indelible wisdom. He just wasn’t much of a teacher; he’d become one because he had no idea what else to do. He saw what his gifted colleagues accomplished, how again and again they could transport their students, how they could effortlessly, ingeniously, compel them to learn.
When he got out of the shower, which was lined with beautiful blue tiles rather than the usual molded plastic, he hunted through his bag for his toothbrush but couldn’t find it. He had nothing, not a fucking thing except a bag of dirty clothes and forty-something dollars, and until this moment, that had somehow been okay with him, but now, just like that, it wasn’t. It wasn’t okay. He finished getting dressed and sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the blank television screen. He imagined that the two prisoners who had been standing beside the man he’d hit had concocted some story about how they’d seen Henry’s car swerve across the shoulder. They’d jumped away just in time, he imagined them saying, but their friend had been too old, too frail, to react so quickly. Henry had been speeding, they were certain. He’d been speeding and had stared straight through the windshield into their eyes like a crazy lunatic or a demon or someone sky-high on crystal meth. He had tried to get all three of them, that angry-white-man son of a bitch. He had tried for sure to kill them.
Henry sat on the bed until he heard a knock on the door. Instead of the sheriff, it was the same deputy who had shown up at the accident, asked him a few brief questions, and silently driven him into town. The deputy removed his hat and said, “Good morning, sir,” and shook Henry’s hand. Henry looked at him, at the pink scalp visible beneath his crew cut and the imprint his hat had left along his brow. Henry realized that yesterday he’d been wrong; he’d thought the man was cold and unflinching, a hard-ass ex-military type, but in fact, he was just a kid. The accident, the glass and blood and the man’s body, must have scared him. Maybe here, in rural Virginia, in Marimore County, he’d never seen such a thing.
“I’m ready,” Henry said, and he thought about putting his arms out, wrists together, as if he expected the deputy to handcuff him. But this kid wouldn’t understand that Henry was joking. And what kind of person would joke at a time like this anyway? A man was dead. Still dead, Henry heard in his head. Could you be still dead?
Henry followed the deputy out to the patrol car and climbed into the backseat just as he had done yesterday. The front passenger seat was outfitted with some kind of computer equipment—to catch speeders, Henry guessed. Once they’d pulled out onto the highway, the deputy looked back over his shoulder and said, “I’ve got family there, sir.” The car radio squawked, and the deputy turned it down.
“I’m sorry?” Henry said, leaning forward.
“In New Orleans, sir,” he said. “Or nearby, on the Gulf Coast. Pass Christian?”
“Sure,” Henry said. “I’ve been there. Are they okay?”
“They’re okay. Yes, sir,” the deputy said. “We didn’t hear for a while, but then they called.”
“I’m glad,” Henry said.
“Yes, sir,” the deputy said. “We were mighty relieved. It�
�s my cousin and her husband and their girls. Two of them, six and nine.”
“How are things down there?” Henry said. “I haven’t been able to keep up.”
“From everything I hear, it’s not good, sir. As far as my cousin’s place goes, it’s all gone. Their house and every house for miles. The trees too. All of them snapped off like matchsticks, they said.”
Henry tried to imagine it, tried to picture the ravaged landscape. Once, when Henry was a kid, his father had taken him for a drive along the Gulf Coast not long after it had been hit by a hurricane. He’d been amazed by how far the tugboats and barges had been carried inland and by the houses with their walls stripped away, some with everything still in place, beds and tables and chairs arranged as if inside a giant dollhouse. His father had liked driving among such ruins, Henry suspected; he had seemed to somehow seek out these places—old railroad stations and abandoned warehouses and overgrown cemeteries and, once, an empty lumber mill that still smelled of sawdust and pine. It was as if his father were secretly hoping to commune with whatever ghosts might be lingering there. He’d send Henry out to the car to fetch his camera, an old Leica he’d bought from one of his students at Tulane, but once the pictures were developed, he was always disappointed with them, as if they’d failed to capture whatever mystery or romance he’d felt.
Sometimes, on Saturday mornings, he’d hustle Henry out to the car, and they would head west out of the city on River Road, staying on that two-lane highway as it followed the curve of the Mississippi, the flames and smoke from the gasoline refineries alternately illuminating and darkening the sky. Eventually, his father would turn off, not at the grand plantation houses that had been converted into restaurants or museums but at the signs for towns like Maringouin, Wallace, St. Gabriel, and Killona, towns where his father would drive past ramshackle houses and junk-strewn lawns until he spotted someone sitting out on a front porch, an old man smoking a pipe or a woman snapping beans or shucking corn. He’d stop the car then, get out, and wave. If the person waved back and said hello, his father would approach, put a foot up on the porch step, wipe his forehead with a handkerchief, and engage the man or woman in conversation. Sometimes Henry would get out and stretch his legs, but usually he just stayed in the car. He knew his father was almost done when he pulled the small black notebook and pencil from his pocket, pointed up and down the street, and then began jotting down directions. Years later, when he and Amy went to see To Kill a Mockingbird at the Prytania—somehow he’d never seen the movie, despite the fact that for years he’d taught the book to the high-school kids—he was struck by how familiar it all seemed, how much it made him think of his father. Henry wondered if his father had intentionally crafted this role for himself, an imitation of Gregory Peck’s assured and honorable Atticus Finch, the noble white man these poor black folks could trust.
A Thousand Miles from Nowhere Page 10
