A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

by John Gregory Brown

  Henry knew, of course, what his father was doing: he was conducting research, asking about the town’s history and its current state of affairs, about the jobs people had and those they’d lost, about the local churches and bars. He’d once explained to Henry that churches and bars were the two places you could find out the most about how people lived and the music they made. “God and the devil at war for men’s souls,” he’d said, “and music is always the ammunition.” Armed with whatever information he’d gathered, his father would go back to these towns on his own, without Henry, showing up at the bars on Saturday nights and at the churches on Sunday mornings. He kept a tape recorder, a bulky reel-to-reel machine, in the trunk of his car in case there was something worth recording.

  He’d also told Henry that if they kept driving on River Road just about all the way to Baton Rouge, they’d end up at the Angola penitentiary, about the worst and most hateful prison in the entire country. There was music there too, he’d said, songs the men had sung to get themselves through all the years of hard labor they were forced to do, working in the prison’s cotton fields all day in the hot sun. “You’ve heard Lead Belly,” his father had said, and Henry had nodded. “Well, that’s where John Lomax found him. He got him out of there and made him famous.”

  Henry had asked his father if he’d ever been inside the Angola penitentiary and he said he had been, once or twice. Then he’d gone on and on about the problem of conducting accurate research, of getting the true history of such music. “These are people who have learned to tell you what they think you want to hear. There are a lot of men like me wanting to hear this music and record it. So they’ll sell you whatever it is you’re buying. You understand?”

  His father had looked over at him then, squinting, and Henry had nodded again. But he hadn’t really been listening. He’d been trying to imagine his father inside the prison, behind barbed-wire fences and iron bars. How frightened had he been that someone might pull out a knife or a gun? Had he stood next to someone who had killed somebody, someone who might wind up being put to death in the electric chair?

  His father was still talking, explaining how John Lomax wasn’t the first to go hunting for songs at Angola, that a professor from Iowa named Harry Oster had made recordings of the prisoners years ago, of singers with names that made Henry want to laugh: Hogman Maxey and Guitar Welch and Butterbeans and Roosevelt Charles.

  “What did they do to wind up there?” Henry had asked.

  “All kinds of things,” his father had said.

  “Like killing people?”

  “Some of them,” his father answered. “Some just had the misfortune of being in the wrong place.”

  “Like where?”

  “Well,” his father said, “for some people, just about anywhere can wind up being the wrong place.”

  After his father disappeared, Henry had wondered if it was possible that his father had somehow wound up in prison, not as a visitor but as an inmate, that maybe he’d done something so violent and shameful that his mother wouldn’t tell Henry or Mary that this was where he was—in prison, at Angola. But what crime could he have committed that was so awful and unforgivable?

  Henry knew the answer, of course. He knew it from all those blues songs his father had played for him, about the stranger who steps into the barroom and lets his eyes rest on the beautiful woman who belongs to another man and then buys her a drink or puts his hand on the fine soft skin of her arm or at the curve of her hip or says something in her ear that makes her laugh or pretend she’s going to slap him. And just that—a single look or touch or word—would be enough for clenched fists or flashing knives or a drawn gun and a bullet right between the eyes or square through the heart.

  He could have killed a man, Henry thought. He could have killed a man and then done the only thing there was left to do. Run.

  Seven

  THE DEPUTY pulled up at the courthouse, got out, shook Henry’s hand again, and told him where he needed to go. “Just ask for Judge Martin’s office,” he said. “I’m on patrol, sir, so I can’t show you in, but let me know if there’s anything else I can do.” He started walking back to the car but then turned and said, “Sheriff Roland is arranging a call for relief supplies, for things we could bring down to the Gulf Coast. I told him that, on account of my cousin and all, I’d like to drive the truck down.”

  He seemed to be waiting for Henry to say something—maybe to thank him for his charity or offer to go down there with him. “Well, good luck,” Henry said.

  “Good luck to you too, sir,” the deputy said, nodding toward the courthouse. “Judge Martin’s a good man.” Then the deputy laughed and said, “A little scatterbrained sometimes, though.” He nodded again. “Just so you know.”

  “Thanks,” Henry said, and he headed into the courthouse. Just inside the front door, in a glass-covered case, a tattered American flag was on display. A sign inside the case, printed in what looked like a child’s sloping script, said that the flag was from World War II, that it had been to Europe and back. Count the stars! the sign said. How many are there?

  Henry looked for someone who could tell him where the judge’s office was, but all of the people congregated in the lobby looked haggard and forlorn, slumped in their chairs with their heads down as though they were simply waiting to hear the awful price they’d pay for whatever they’d done wrong. Henry wondered if he was supposed to join them, to just wait there until he was summoned. He imagined gathering every last one of them around him, announcing he was in possession of some good news they needed mightily to hear. Whatever awful torment and troubles you’ve got, he would tell them, his voice rising, radio-preacher-style, words spilling forth like a waterfall, crackling like a spitting fire, they sure enough can’t be nearly as great as mine. Maybe you are plagued by relentless nightmares. Maybe you can’t turn your mind from desire. Maybe you’ve lost your wife and your home, but here is the good news, my friends. How many of you have just killed a man? You may have wanted to a thousand times or a thousand times times a thousand, but how many have gone and done it, seen the red blood and smelled the dead red smell of it?

  Then a door at the rear of the lobby opened, and a short, wiry man in a suit and bow tie stepped out and looked around. Henry knew it had to be the judge by the way the others in the lobby looked at him, straightening their shoulders and pulling their hands from their pockets. Henry walked toward him, and the man stretched out his hand. “Mr. Garrett?” he said.

  “Judge Martin?” Henry said.

  “I’m afraid so,” the judge said, and he put a hand on Henry’s shoulder and, squinting his eyes, looked around the lobby as if he were momentarily confused. “Thanks for coming in. Let’s talk in my office.”

  He led Henry back through the door and down a long hall and then into the courtroom, which looked to Henry more like a church. There were rows of old wooden pews facing the judge’s bench, the pews covered in dark red cushions. A gold disk hung on the wall behind the bench, some kind of official seal, Henry guessed, though it wasn’t anything he’d ever seen before; it had a bear holding what looked like a sheaf of arrows with a scroll beneath it that said something in Latin. The judge walked so fast that Henry, his legs still sore, had trouble keeping up. Through a door on the other side of the courtroom was the judge’s office, and Henry was greeted there by a woman seated at an old wooden desk on the side of which was stenciled U.S. Coast Guard followed by a series of numbers.

  “This is Mr. Garrett,” Judge Martin said to the woman, and Henry thought he detected some measure of impatience in his voice.

  “Well, hello!” the woman said brightly as if Henry were a child who had gotten lost and mistakenly wandered into the office. She rolled forward in her chair and shook Henry’s hand. “I’m Marge,” she announced. “You just let me know if you need anything at all.”

  “Thank you,” Henry said.

  The judge led Henry through another door into his private office. “Here,” he said, removing s
ome books from a chair. “Have a seat.” Henry sat and looked around. There were files everywhere, covering the judge’s desk and stacked on the floor and perched on the windowsill; open leather-bound books were spread across a long table amid scattered papers and cassette tapes. In a corner of the office were piles of cardboard boxes. Did just about everyone live like this, Henry wondered, in this state of chaos and disorder, their lives on the verge of spinning out of control? His own mess at Endly’s, Latangi’s crowded apartment, this judge’s office—there was so much stuff in the world. He imagined what it must look like in New Orleans, thousands and thousands of people’s possessions, all of it now junk, floating in the water or, surely worse, buried beneath it.

  Judge Martin rifled through the files on his desk until he found the one he was looking for. “Here,” he said, opening it, and Henry figured that it was the report the sheriff had written. “Just a minute,” he said, looking up at Henry and then continuing to read.

  “I don’t know why I’m here,” Henry said, and he realized how pathetic he sounded, how lost.

  The judge held up his hand and then finally, after another minute or two, set the report aside. “Well, it’s just a shame, isn’t it? Of all the folks he had to choose—as if you didn’t have enough on your plate.”

  “I’m sorry,” Henry said. “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s not a whole lot to understand, I’m afraid,” the judge said, and he pushed himself back in his chair. “Sheriff Roland was able to determine that Mr. Hughes was hoping to receive the inmate death benefit for his family. That’s why he did what he did. But it’s only for an accidental death, not a suicide, and it’s pretty clear, despite the unconventional means, that’s what we’ve got here.” The judge picked up the report again, sighed, and threw it back onto his desk. “You just happened to be the one driving by. It’s just lucky you weren’t hurt.”

  “I’m not hurt,” Henry said. He looked down at the cut on his arm, already nothing more than a thin, jagged line. He had been right, after all. This man Hughes had stepped out onto the highway, had raised his arms—not to fly but to welcome the awful impact, to have it be done. “What do I need to do now?” he said, looking back up at Judge Martin.

  “Nothing at all,” the judge said. “It might take a few days, though. I’ve got to sign off on this, file it in Richmond. I’ll meet with Mrs. Hughes and explain it to her. I’ll try to determine what her circumstances are. There are a lot of poor folks in this county, Mr. Garrett. Five thousand dollars would have gone a long way. She’s got diabetes, I know that. And she gets dialysis. She’s no doubt facing some medical bills.”

  “Is that what it would have been?” Henry asked. “Five thousand dollars?”

  “It’s awfully sad, isn’t it?” the judge said. “Five thousand dollars.”

  “Can I ask why he was there?” Henry said.

  “On the work crew?” the judge asked, squinting again.

  “I mean in prison,” Henry said. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to know. Was it that if the man had killed or raped someone, he wouldn’t have to feel as awful about it?

  “This and that. Bad checks, this last time,” the judge said. “He wasn’t a rotten egg. In fact, all told, he was a pretty good one. He was in my court over and over, though, and it was just about always in regard to money. Theft or fraud, breaking and entering. This is a poor county, Mr. Garrett. There’s lots of folks in about the same shape. I didn’t have a choice but to incarcerate Mr. Hughes for a while this time. I’m sorry I did, of course. I’m terribly sorry I did. He lost a daughter a few years back. Quite a few years now, if I remember correctly. She left a child behind, a boy. I administer the family court as well, handling divorces and determining custody. They wanted to keep that boy. Mrs. Hughes sat there and cried and said no matter her infirmity and her husband’s record, she’d raise him properly. And she has. I’ve never had him here in court. He’s probably fifteen or so by now.”

  The judge looked at Henry, but Henry didn’t know what to say. He wanted to ask about his car, about how he might get some money, about what he was supposed to do next. But it didn’t seem right to ask any of that. This man Hughes was dead; he’d left a widow behind, and a grandson. What had made Henry think his circumstances were worse than anyone else’s?

  The judge stood up. “You have transportation back to the Spotlight?” he asked.

  Henry had no idea what the judge was talking about, then he remembered seeing something with the words The Spotlight in the motel office. Out front, near the highway, the sign was just a generic one; all it said was Motel.

  “I don’t,” Henry said. “My car was in bad shape. It had to be towed. I don’t even know where it is.”

  “Where were you headed?” the judge asked. “The report said you were fleeing the hurricane. It said you’d lost your home.”

  “I’ve got a sister in Baltimore,” he said, and his words sounded to him less like the truth than the lyrics to a song, some country-music tale of heartbreak and regret. He decided not to tell the judge that he thought Amy might be living somewhere nearby. “I was thinking of going up to Baltimore to see her.”

  “Well, let’s see what we can do for you,” the judge said, and he led Henry out of the office to his secretary. “I’ve got to prepare for a hearing, but Marge will help you out.”

  The woman looked up from her computer. “I sure will!” she said.

  The judge shook Henry’s hand. “Again, I’m sorry, Mr. Garrett. Would you mind checking back with us in a few days just to make sure it’s all settled?”

  “I will,” Henry said. “I’m not sure I’ll get very far without my car.” He couldn’t believe this was all there was to it. A man was dead, and all the judge had had to do was shake his hand and that was that.

  “Well, Marge will see about your car and anything else you need,” he said. “And I hope you get back home before too long, Mr. Garrett. It’s a real mess down there. I can’t believe how bad it is.”

  How bad is it? Henry wanted to ask, but he simply watched as the judge retreated into his office and shut the door. When he turned to the secretary, she was staring up at him. “Now, you tell me what I can do,” she said. “That’s my job. That’s what I’m here for. We’ll get you fixed up straightaway.” And she smiled at Henry and reached over to pat his arm as if, once again, she were speaking to a child. He thought about Latangi touching his arm in the same kind, solicitous way.

  What did he need? A car. Some cash. A clear head. A telephone.

  “I need to call someone,” he said. “Is there a phone I could use?”

  “Yes, there is,” the woman said, and she pointed to a chair next to her desk. “Sit yourself right here, now.”

  Henry picked up the receiver and closed his eyes. He could not remember Mary’s number. He could not even remember the Baltimore area code. He opened his eyes and saw that Marge was looking at him. Her face seemed to be frozen into a smile, as if it were something she applied in the morning with her makeup, her lips a bright cherry red, her eyebrows penciled into perfect brown crescents. He put the receiver on the desk and slumped down in the chair. “I’m not—” he began, but he didn’t know what to say, couldn’t figure out what to do next. He ran a hand through his hair and rubbed his eyes.

  “Never you mind, Mr. Garrett,” Marge said, gently replacing the receiver. “You just take it slow, and we’ll get right through this one step at a time.”

  “Yes,” Henry said, nodding, closing his eyes again. “I just need to think.”

  “That’s just what I do!” he heard Marge say, and he could hear her clicking her fingernails on the desk. “When I need to, it doesn’t matter where I am, I just close my eyes and bring everything to a screeching halt. You need to think, Marge, I say to myself. You need to think. I was reading about it in Reader’s Digest, about how doctors have gone and proved it’s true. Closing the eyes really is the first step in clearing the mind and finding peace. I can’t remember if they used
monkeys or people or just what they did, but somehow they proved it.”

  Henry listened not to Marge’s voice but to her clacking fingernails. He thought of Latangi, of her pale blue nails with their specks of glitter. He thought about the red speck in Amy’s eye and the rhythm of his father’s bass and the man, Mr. Hughes, bloody, dead, lying on the highway, and he thought about what he’d believed when his father first disappeared—that he knew exactly where his father had gone. His father had talked about it once with Henry. He’d told him that for nearly a decade, Thelonious Monk had been living not in New York but across the Hudson in New Jersey, at the home of the same rich white woman, a baroness, who had taken in Charlie Parker. All those years and the world had heard nothing from Monk, no music or concerts or interviews, and most people just assumed he was dead. But he wasn’t dead. He was right there, across the river, and he wanted to go there sometime, see if he could just talk to Monk, find out what he had to say after all those years of silence. He wanted to see for himself if what people said was true—that Monk hadn’t touched the piano in years, that he hardly ever spoke a word, even to his wife, Nellie, who was living there too, that he just lay in bed staring out the picture window at the lights of New York as if he were peering up at the stars in the night sky.