A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

by John Gregory Brown

  “Guess,” she said, smiling now.

  Henry picked up the keys. Rooms 27 and 28. He held them up. “Twenty-seven or twenty-eight?” he said.

  “Close enough,” she said, shaking her head. “Close enough. I hope you get some sleep.”

  The room had two beds. Katrell Sparrow sprawled out on one of them. He had not even gotten under the covers. Marge was next door. When they arrived, she’d opened the connecting door between the two rooms. She’d leaned in and, smiling, offered Katrell a toothbrush and toothpaste.

  “Anything else you need?” she asked him.

  “No, ma’am,” he said.

  “Then get some rest. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”

  Henry took a shower. When he stepped back out into the room, he found Katrell already asleep. It was after three a.m. The clatter in his head had quieted. He lay down and heard the room’s air conditioner humming. He could see it stirring the heavy curtains in the window, a line of fluorescent light appearing and disappearing as the curtains fluttered. Eventually, his eyes adjusted to the dark, and he could see Katrell’s long limbs, one of his arms dangling off the mattress. He could hear his breathing: smooth and deep and silent, no rattle or wheeze. I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you.

  Quiet, quiet.

  Shouldn’t this boy, this young man, be afraid? Or at least thoroughly perplexed by this journey, by the people he had given himself over to? How had he come to be here? How had all the losses he’d endured, the poverty in which he had lived, led to this? Shouldn’t he be blind with bitterness and rage?

  Henry realized that he, of course, was the one who had been endlessly fearful and perplexed, endlessly injured, endlessly bitter. She looked into the distance, he heard in his head. He tried to stop himself from picturing Edna Pontellier standing there on the beach, stripping naked, stepping into the water. He tried to see, instead, the words, as though he were merely reading: She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. He listened to his own breathing. He set his own terror aside, let it slide away, let it sink.

  Quiet, quiet.

  He listened to the air conditioner’s humming, watched how the breeze stirred the curtains, how it covered and uncovered the strip of light. Tomorrow, he thought, tomorrow—but he kept himself from thinking any more, any further. He closed his eyes and slept.

  Sixteen

  HE WOKE up to wind and rain. He could hear the wind rattling the room’s windows, whistling beneath the door. He could hear the rain beating against the hoods of cars in the parking lot and against the squat motel’s flat roof, pouring over the gutters, splashing onto the pavement. Katrell Sparrow was still asleep, one arm still dangling off the mattress.

  Henry closed his eyes and listened; he imagined New Orleans filling up again, water pouring once more through the breached levees, running through the streets, battered houses washed away, more bodies floating facedown, shirts and dresses billowing out like tattered sails, like burial shrouds.

  Keep well, Latangi had told him. Bhalo thakben.

  On the TV he’d heard the reporters and anchors, the politicians and stranded residents—he’d heard them all say the same thing: This doesn’t look like America. How can this be America? Who could believe that we would allow this to happen here?

  Keep well, Latangi had said. He listened to the wind and rain. How was he going to keep well?

  When Henry began taking the pills Rusty Campbell had given him, he’d been afraid that somehow he would lose his place in this life the way one lost one’s place in a book, turning page after page in search of a familiar line or scene, unable to locate it. What if taking the pills left him wanting only peace and quiet, content to leave Tomas Otxoa to whatever fate might await him, content to forget Amy, to let his past—his mother, his father, Mary—slip away? The clamor and clatter, the music and voices, the passages from books, the lines from poems, the snatches of conversations and dreams—they were all part of his memory, the material from which, of which, his self was composed. But he understood now that he did not have to forsake that self, that he still remembered all of it: the sweat on his father’s brow, the musty scent of his gray suit, the scratch and pop of the record in its groove before the music began, the hand clutching the steering wheel, the white crescents in his father’s fingernails against the bass’s black neck, the weariness in his voice. Don’t go looking for it. Don’t.

  He had wanted to go looking. He had wanted to see that place where his father had gone. How dark it must be, a lightless cavern, an ocean of unimaginable depth, but was it empty as well, as empty as Mohit’s monastic study? Or was it a place of swirling memory and sensation, of ceaseless clatter and clamor?

  Yes, he had wanted to know, definitively, where exactly his father had gone, and how could he know unless he followed behind him, called out again and again for him, listened for an answer?

  How easy it would be, really, to get up, open the door, and walk out right now into the wind and rain, to disappear down the bank of the highway, drenched and anonymous, into the brush and pine woods. And then? And then what? What would he have to do? Find some body of water—sea or lake or swamp—to step into? Find a rope? A gun? Could he not simply lie down and let sleep overtake him?

  What courage would be required?

  Not courage. No. Cruelty.

  There was Marge and Katrell Sparrow. He couldn’t just leave them here.

  And Amy, Mary, Latangi.

  He heard Katrell Sparrow stir. Henry opened his eyes and saw the boy sit up.

  What was there to say to him, to this child who had not invited a moment of the loss and grief and sorrow into his life? And to the thousands and thousands of others visited, as this child had been visited, by wreck and ruin?

  “It’s raining,” Katrell said quietly, barely a whisper, rubbing his eyes.

  “It is,” Henry said, sitting up as well so that he faced the boy, their feet nearly touching. “How did you sleep?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Katrell said, shaking his head side to side. “I’m still too sleepy.”

  Henry thought about Marge, what she would do now. She would laugh at the boy, find pleasure in his grogginess, in his reply.

  How did you sleep?

  I don’t know yet. I’m too sleepy.

  A wonder. It’s all a wonder, Amy had said.

  A wonder. A wander. That too, she’d said.

  God, how he missed her. Just like in a book, the lousiest of love stories, his heart ached and ached. How could he say good-bye to the dead, to the clatter, to the chaos inside him? He must say good-bye, but how?

  Henry heard tapping on the door between the two rooms. Marge.

  “We’re awake,” Henry said.

  “Rise and shine!” he heard Marge call out.

  “Just a few minutes,” Henry said.

  She rapped three more times on the door, a kind of salute. “See you in the lobby for breakfast!”

  “Okay,” Henry said. Like in a book, the rain had stopped. Marge had appeared, and the rain had stopped.

  Just beyond Jackson, still three hours from New Orleans, the destruction was already apparent. The trees—long lines of pine beside the highway—had simply snapped in the ferocious winds. Power lines had been ripped down; metal towers had collapsed; houses sagged, roofless, blue tarps thrown over them. Marge was driving again, and Henry kept nodding, kept answering Yes, yes, as Katrell Sparrow pointed to anything that caught his eye. “Look,” Katrell would say as they approached a sagging billboard stand or the twisted ruins of a gas station or a concrete slab covered by what had been a building but was now merely a crumbling pile of bricks. “You see that?”

  Henry saw it all, of course, and began to worry about Katrell encountering what lay ahead. Surely by now there wouldn’t be anything so horrible and grotesque that the boy should not be allowed to see it. Surely by now all the bodies had been discovered and removed, the dead animals carted a
way.

  As they made their way closer and closer to New Orleans, past Ponchatoula, past Lake Maurepas, Katrell stopped pointing, stopped asking Henry if he too had seen this or that. There was too much now, too many snapped trees and dangling wires and damaged buildings, too many piles of rubble. They all simply looked out at the ruin. Even Marge seemed stunned into silence. She tapped her fingernails on the steering wheel and from time to time shook her head. But she didn’t say anything; she didn’t seem to know what to say. Nearly every tree was snapped in half or torn from the ground; nearly every structure had been leveled. Dirt and sand spilled across the highway; lining the road was an endless array of detritus: overturned boats, giant spools of black wire, crumbled cinder blocks, tree stumps, rusted refrigerators, abandoned cars, a backyard swing set, a microwave oven balanced atop a child’s high chair, a row of saplings, their root balls knotted in burlap, lying on the ground like the bodies of executed soldiers. The sky was clear; the sun was shining. There were no birds anywhere.

  Here was the land of the dead, Henry thought. There seemed to be no one anywhere. For miles and miles there were no other cars. He had expected—well, what had he expected? Activity and enterprise, recovery and rebuilding. He had expected something. Instead, there was nothing.

  And then, up ahead, with the skyline of downtown now clearly visible in the distance, Henry saw what he’d figured they would see as they neared the city: a roadblock, bright red plastic barrels stretched across the highway, orange and white wooden sawhorses behind them, each displaying a sign that said Do Not Enter. Marge slowed as they approached.

  What was the story they would tell? Henry had known all along that they would have to have a story to tell, that it would have to be a good one: why they were there, why they should be allowed to enter the city, why they needed to be allowed. And Henry knew what he planned to say; he’d known that since they left, though he’d not told Marge, though he’d not really even told himself. The words were just there, ready to be spoken, the only words he figured would be sufficiently compelling. My father, he would say. My father was here for the storm, and I saw him, I saw him on the news, still here in the city, in a building I own, and I am here to get him because he is old and he is not well, is of course not well, because why else would he not have left, why else would he not have called out for rescue, for someone to save him, but we are here all the way from Virginia, and all we need is to get to this one small building, an old grocery store on Magazine Street, and find him if he is still, if he is still—

  But there was no one to whom he might tell this story, to whom he might beg to be allowed entrance. Beyond the red plastic barrels and the orange and white wooden sawhorses there was no one, not for as far as they could see ahead, so what were they to do? What else was there to do but drive past the roadblock, ignore it, drive until someone stopped them, asked what in the hell they thought they were doing, where in the hell they thought they were going.

  “Here we are,” Henry said as they stopped at the roadblock, and he turned to Marge.

  “Well, I guess it is about noon,” she said. “Must be lunch break.” She looked over at Henry and laughed. She was afraid, though. Henry saw that for the first time—that for all her lighthearted banter, she was afraid of what they were going to find.

  “Do we wait?” Henry asked her.

  “I don’t believe we wait,” Marge said. “There’s no hiding in any case. Sooner or later we’ll be spotted. They want to turn us around, they can turn us then.”

  “Okay,” Henry said. He motioned for Katrell to get out with him. The red barrels were weighted with concrete, but they managed to nudge two of them far enough to the side to create a path Marge could fit her car through. Then they moved three of the sawhorses and, once Marge had driven through, put everything back where it had been.

  It felt strange to Henry—sickening and strange—to be standing there in the middle of the highway with this boy whose grandfather he’d struck and killed. What had he been thinking to allow Katrell to make this trip, to allow him to see all this? He put his arm around Katrell’s shoulder. “Thank you,” he said. “For the help with this.”

  “Yes, sir,” Katrell said.

  They got back into the car. “That’s not all,” Henry said to Marge. “That can’t possibly be all.”

  “We’ll just see,” Marge said, and they drove on, slowly, debris piled everywhere, tree branches and torn carpets, refrigerators and sofas, dirty clothes spilling from garbage bags, tattered blankets and curtains, plastic children’s toys. Henry thought about Endly’s and all the discarded items people had left outside the door. How was there so much stuff in the world? And then again he saw Tomas, inside, looking out. Where would he have gone now, almost a week later? He could not still be there. What had he been thinking, that he could save Tomas?

  After they’d driven a few more miles, Henry directed Marge toward the fork in the highway that would lead them downtown. They approached another roadblock with the same red barrels. Here, though, was a police car with flashing lights parked directly in the center of the road.

  “Okay, now,” Marge said, creeping forward, lowering her window. “Here we go.”

  An officer stepped from the police car, and Marge began rifling through her purse, no doubt searching for her license. Henry could see already, from the man’s stern expression, that they would be turned around, denied entrance. This officer would not give a damn what story Henry told him.

  Henry shut his eyes, just for a moment. He shut them not to quiet but to register—was that the right word, register?—the cacophony, the clatter and clamor: Latangi’s lilting voice and Skip James singing, Crow Jane, Crow Jane, hold your head up high, and his mother, I’m content, I’m content, and Tomas Otxoa, You must speak in a Christian language, and pebbles blowing across his great-uncle’s shoes high on the mountain and the car, his car, striking the old man, all the blood there, all the ruin before him.

  He opened his eyes and turned to Marge. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to do this.”

  “What?” Marge said, still rifling through her purse, so nervous that her shoulders were shaking.

  He looked back at Katrell. “Take care of her, you hear me?” he said, hearing Mrs. Hughes’s voice in his own. You behave yourself.

  He stepped from the car.

  “No!” he heard Marge cry out, but he didn’t turn to look at her.

  “Get back in the vehicle,” the officer said, clear and straightforward, and Henry saw him place his hand on the holster at his hip.

  “Listen, man,” Henry said, and he lurched to the side as though he were drunk and fumbled at his belt.

  “Back in the vehicle!” the officer shouted again.

  “We’ve been driving, you know, forever,” Henry said, shaking his head. “I’ve just got—” He pointed down to the side of the highway and began walking.

  He wouldn’t shoot him—a staggering drunk—in the back, would he, just because he was heading off to pee? Henry kept walking.

  “Officer! Officer!” he heard Marge calling, and he did look back now for just a second and saw Marge holding something—a sheet of paper—out of the car and shaking it, waving it for the officer to see. Henry kept walking, threw one arm up, one finger raised, to signal that he would just be a minute, he would be right back once he’d relieved himself.

  “Fucking hell!” Henry heard the officer shout. He didn’t turn around. Either the officer would shoot him or he wouldn’t. He walked down the embankment toward the road below.

  “Son of a bitch,” the officer said. “Crazy drunk motherfucker.”

  Henry could see exactly where he was. City Park Avenue. Canal Street. St. Patrick Cemetery. He kept walking, waiting to hear the officer fire. Would he hear the shot before the bullet struck him? Or was it too quick, too small a slice of time to be heard?

  He must be, he decided, out of sight by now. He must be.

  So he started to run.

  Seventeen />
  I’M GOIN’ away, to a world unknown. Henry shook the words from his head. No. No. Not a world unknown. He was home. True, the ground beneath his feet was a mosaic of dried mud—amber, fragile as glass, cracking and then turning to dust with his every step. True, a thick gray film coated every oak leaf and branch, every fence post and street sign, every car roof and window and front porch and shrub. The air was thick with an oily septic stink. And every house, every building, was inscribed with the awful spray-painted hieroglyphs he’d seen on TV: who had entered and when and how many dead. Even so. He was home.

  He could feel the entire city circling him, the clatter now tuned to a familiar pitch, not of the ruin around him but of memory—lines from Whitman he’d memorized at fifteen and the languid grace of Pistol Pete, his mother laughing with her friend Marianna Greco, the scent of magnolia and stench of skunk, algae-covered seawall steps, blazing New Year’s Eve bonfires on the levee, the old stereo’s glow, his father’s eyes squinting behind his glasses, brow furrowed, the scrawled note left behind: I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long.

  And the city wasn’t empty. He’d been wrong. It was far from empty. There were people working—hauling scraps of metal and wood from warehouses and storefronts, repairing telephone and electric lines, steering backhoes through rubble—though Henry seemed to be a ghost among them, invisible and silent, even as the cacophony hammered away inside his head. He walked up Canal Street toward Carrollton. No one looked up from his work; no one even noticed him passing. Maybe eventually he’d come across the police or National Guard; he’d seen them on TV marching in a line through the French Quarter to prevent looting. He imagined them stopping him, pinning him facedown in the dirt, and hauling him off—but where would they take him? On the news, in that first week after the storm, he’d seen the shots of Parish Prison and its flooded cells. He’d seen the inmates herded onto the Broad Street overpass in their bright orange shirts and pants, heads slumped in the heat and humidity—not even handcuffed, merely waiting for rescue, waiting for the water to recede so they could be transported out of town to another prison. Or perhaps, Henry thought, they’d simply been set loose, left to wander on their own without food or water or shelter until they finally expired.