South, America

by Rod Davis

  She was leaning against the car, her head back, eyes shut against the clouds drifting in from the southeast. The cool morning had turned warmish, languid. Maybe a storm in the Gulf, maybe a hurricane at the tail end of the season, maybe the gathering of the gods to bring on the end of the world with fire and thunder and flood and pestilence. Gods tired of humans trampling in their domain, to ends that never seemed to turn out for the best.

  23

  It had gotten to be late afternoon and along with the dull throbbing in my body was also a kind of nausea. I felt dizzy, driving back into town. I told Elle I needed something to eat. I pulled into the next convenience store, the kind that sold more lottery tickets and beer than anything else.

  Before I could unbuckle, Elle was out the door and into the store. She came back with a white plastic sack and dug into it for a carton of orange juice. I emptied it in about two swallows. Then I ripped open a pouch of cashews and swallowed a lot of them, and followed that with several gulps of milk from another carton. I let my head lean back against the seat back and closed my eyes.

  “Better?”

  “Getting there.”

  “We’re not in a hurry.”

  I didn’t say anything, just let my mind drift off, maybe into that swarm of birds and angels strafing a Technicolor field atop an Aztec mountain.

  I must have gone to sleep, just for a few minutes. I woke up to my door coming open and Elle caressing my cheek.

  “Can you move over into the other seat? We should probably leave. The clerk inside is starting to look at us too much. Not to mention those two creeps over by the pay phone.”

  I shook my head like a dog and still felt groggy but in no mood to argue. I pushed the seat back down so I could maneuver and fairly awkwardly got myself into the passenger seat. She took the wheel.

  “Sorry.”

  “No problem.”

  She backed out and we zoomed past downtown on the interstate and then dropped off to pick up Carrollton and more or less back toward Magazine Street. My nausea was gone but now the pain of the beating was back.

  “Can you eat something else? Maybe you should.”

  “Yeah. Something. Meat. Protein.”

  “You sound like a caveman.”

  “It’s my new look.”

  She pursed her lips.

  “I’m okay now.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Really. I just let the sugar drop too low. Hasn’t happened in a while.”

  “I thought you got some extra sugar last night.”

  I never seemed to know when she was going there. I tried to say something appropriate but just smiled.

  “Maybe you could take another Vicodin.”

  “I need to be awake. We need to get this taken care of.”

  “We still have a whole day and a half.” She laughed. “Thirty-six hours to avoid the mob.”

  “A French movie.”

  “How about there?”

  The Camellia Grill usually was crowded but we didn’t see anyone queued up outside, and there was a parking place only a half block down.

  This time of day the late lunch and early dinner crowds both were absent. We got a quiet corner on the far side of the counter. The waiter was friendly and professional in the way they were in the city and in no time I had a big cheeseburger in front of me, a toasted cheese for my partner. I ate half of mine before coming up for air.

  I hated this hypoglycemic thing, but I could see how I’d strung myself out so far it was bound to happen. I rested my elbows on the counter, around my plate, staring across the pit in the center of the U-shaped counter to an old man on the other side sipping a milkshake. I was living in a theme park of violence and flight. One could struggle with meaning in such a situation. A semi-diabetic lapse wasn’t the worst that could happen.

  Someone tapped on my shoulder.

  “Earth to Jack . . .”

  I looked over at her, back from wherever.

  “Oh, hey.”

  “Any messages?”

  “The usual. Boy meets girl.”

  “Some girl.”

  “Some boy.”

  She was working on her food pretty good for a change, no daintiness at all, even dipping into the fries. I wanted some but I knew I couldn’t. Carbs turn to glucose.

  She leaned over, not that anyone around us was listening, or could, with the din of the orders being taken the cooks calling out to each other.

  “What do you want to do?”

  I drank about half my iced tea, wiped my mouth with a napkin. “I want to get it off our hands.”

  “Big Red?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  I could see she was thinking.

  “We have to.”

  “I know. I was just wondering if there were another way.”

  I took a bite of my dwindling burger.

  She ate a fry.

  “You have to admit.”

  “I know.”

  “The even weirder thing is that it might be covering up something even more amazing.”

  I popped the last bite into my mouth. “No time for all that.”

  “Just enough time to send it to a one-room show in a drug lord’s house?”

  She was going to be hard about it. Fine. But it was impossible.

  She looked at me directly, then her gaze shifted just slightly, and then she reached for her tea. “You saw it. You know we found something we didn’t expect.”

  “What I expect is that if we don’t give this up, we’re dead meat. It’s fairly simple.”

  A young couple, one white, one black, like us but in reverse, came in, sat nearby. The black guy nodded at me. Then he looked a little harder. I could see he wondered how I got the face. I nodded back, shrugged, made a sign with my hand like a door slamming on my nose. He chuckled, turned back to his girlfriend. I waited until they started talking.

  “Look at me,” I said.

  “I have been.”

  “They don’t ever give up. The mob. Ever.”

  “I was just thinking.”

  “What I think is that you never know how these things go. We don’t know where she’ll end up. Could be the Louvre for all I know. She’s been a lot of places.”

  “Our Lady of Storage.”

  “The Virgin of U-Haul.”

  We were bemused by our cleverness for about the right amount of time.

  Then not.

  “It will make it hard for Trey this way, right? Giving it to that Red guy.”

  “Very hard.”

  “If they have the painting, he doesn’t have the money. They won’t need him.”

  “Plus they don’t like him. You know, it’s really not so different from what your brother was trying to do.”

  She nodded, made a low growling noise. Her eyes were glowing.

  “You okay now to go?”

  I turned on my stool, took her hand, leaned close to her. “I love you, Elle.”

  “Y’all want dessert?”

  Elle turned from looking into my eyes, smiled, and melted the waiter, the way she can do. “Just the check’ll be fine.”

  “You got it, darlin’.”

  Her mouth was in a little smirk. “You sure can pick the romantic moments.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  The waiter came back with our ticket. “Hope to see you again,” he said, looking a lot more at her than at me.

  I left the tab and an extra five so we wouldn’t have to deal with the cashier and we went outside, down the tree-draped sidewalk to the car. We were almost there when she stopped, pulled me to her and kissed me. Like I was saying.

  It didn’t much matter that traffic was rattling down the pot-holed boulevard or people were walking by us, or that the river was churning a few hundred
yards off, beyond the levee, or that someone in our immediate circle of acquaintances probably wasn’t going to see the other side of the weekend. What mattered was what she whispered in my ear:

  “Of course I love you.”

  The smart bet was to call Big Red right away but instead we went back to our room. The idea was that I would lie down and rest for an hour or two and then we’d make the call and meet wherever he said. I didn’t even know if he’d be in New Orleans, although my guess was that he had an idea that’s where this would all wind up.

  We drew the blinds and turned up the air-conditioner. I pulled off my shoes and no sooner had put my head on the pillow than she was on the bed, next to me, sitting on her knees, taking off her dress. She touched my ribs lightly and asked me if I could handle it. I lied and said I could. After, I drifted to sleep.

  I awoke as she pushed hard on my shoulder. She was sitting on the side of the bed. She had dressed again, and held her phone in her other hand. Her hair was damp and comb-lined from the shower.

  “He called.”

  I raised myself on one elbow, rubbed my face. I was naked under a light quilt. I guess she had put it there.

  “Who?”

  She was across the bed again, one knee curled under her. She looked at the phone in her hand, as though it were some alien presence. “Trey.”

  I sat up all the way, for some reason pulled the quilt over my lap.

  “I guess everyone has my cell number.”

  “He knows where we are?”

  “No. But it doesn’t matter.”

  Her face was flushed from sex, but inside of that, pale and taut. I think I knew what she was going to say before she said it. Maybe I was catching the second sight.

  “He has my aunt.”

  24

  What had seemed a lucky find at the U-Haul yesterday was looking a lot less that way when we woke up Friday morning. We were to meet Trey at 9 p.m., although we wouldn’t know the location until 8, when he was to call with directions. So now we had a day to fill, as last night after Trey’s message also had to be filled, although exhaustion and Vicodin bridged that gap pretty effectively. Elle woke me up once, a nightmare she didn’t want to go into, and then fell asleep with her head on my chest. But today we had plenty to do. Things were going to be moving fast and I had to contemplate an abrupt, violent and permanent exit from the city. Diddy-mao, GI, for sure. I wanted to get to my apartment now more than ever. It was possible there’d be something there that would help us, or help Lenora. It seemed at least worth a drive-by. And we couldn’t just sit still.

  Elle said Trey told her he’d picked Lenora up in Jackson after she’d left Rosedale and we’d gone to New Orleans. He said he knew I’d met Big Red, and that I had been given an assignment. That’s what he wanted to talk about. He thought it would be better to give him the painting as soon as we had it. Especially it would be better for Lenora. Apparently he wasn’t afraid of her anymore. But he didn’t dwell on it. If we didn’t bring the painting to him, he said, he’d have to give Lenora, and us, more thought.

  He also said something that I could tell was twisting Elle up. She told me his first words when he called were, “Hey, little darlin’, it’s your brother.”

  We packed up. It was unlikely we’d be coming back before, or for that matter after meeting Trey. I left an envelope with a hundred-dollar bill and a few twenties to cover our stay, and then some. Boots wasn’t home and I didn’t want to just leave as though we’d skipped. If we did make it back, we could decide if we wanted to keep the place any longer; if not, well, he could handle it however he wanted. It wasn’t like we’d really been there, unless he said so. It was a strange feeling. The monks say leave no footprint behind, wipe the sand clean. Until now, I had always thought that sounded enticing.

  We had a late breakfast just off Napoleon and started threading across town. There was just no fast way to get from Uptown to the Marigny no matter how you went, but I gambled on Magazine then through the warehouse district and on across Canal to Decatur. We did pretty well until we got close to the old Jax brewery, reimagined as a mall, where a mule-drawn buggy full of tourists blocked the only clear lane.

  We both stared blankly at the human tableau: shorts and T-shirts, Midwestern khaki conventioneers, suits who couldn’t leave the cell phones even for a half-minute, the steady infiltration of black-clad Goths and losers from every part of America who got here because that’s where the river dropped them off. In Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone said Vietnam had been the place where American kids went to find out about themselves. “Bummer for the gooks,” he wrote.

  Ditto for the Big Easy.

  The traffic cleared a little and I cut up on the back side of the French Market past the Café du Monde and finally into the Marigny. Too late, I realized I was about to drive down the block where I had found Terrell.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  I passed along slowly where he had been. I stopped on the far side of the street. We both looked at the curb.

  Whatever blood had been there was long since gone. An empty plastic drink cup lay in the gutter.

  I eased forward.

  When we got a block away from my street, I slowed to a crawl again. A taxi had been behind us and squeezed by, somehow. I tried to get a quick recon.

  The street was mostly empty. I could see the trash had been picked up, although as usual the trucks had left behind a small trail.

  I parked near the end of the block and we walked to the gate. I opened the padlock and then we went single-file down the shaded, narrow path that led to the garden and then my apartment at the rear. Despite everything else going on, Elle was extremely interested in seeing just where, and how, her new boyfriend lived. Or maybe it was just a way to pretend for a short time that something about what had happened with us was in any way normal.

  I knocked on the Beckers’ rear screen door while Elle walked through the garden, admiring the multicolored flowers in their well-tended beds.

  I waited over a minute and no one answered so I figured they must still be in Atlanta. I walked back to my unit.

  Whatever hesitancy I’d had in my gut about actually coming back here got what the shrinks call validation as soon as I opened the door.

  “Oh, my god,” she said, fanning the air in front of her face, retreating midway into the garden.

  My eyes were watering and I had to spit to try to get out whatever had come into my lungs and mouth.

  I looked back at the Beckers’ door. A bad thought came into my head. I think she got it at the same time.

  “You don’t think—” she called out, still scowling from the smell.

  “I’m going in.”

  I took a couple of breaths, pulled the front of my shirt from my jeans to reach over my nose and entered.

  Not only was the odor putrid, the place was way too warm, like the gas heaters actually had been left on.

  The wreckage was total, but before I could take inventory, I had to be able to breathe. I hurried to the kitchen door at the back, which I rarely used, since it led to nowhere but the wooden fence near the alley. But I didn’t have to push the door at all; it had been jimmied and swung open immediately.

  I let that thought go for the time, and opened the window over the sink. The smell was hitting me hard again, so I turned on the cold water and splashed my face.

  I was pulling a dish cloth from one of the half-open drawers to use as a bandana when I noticed the stove. The burners on top weren’t lit, but heat was coming from somewhere.

  The oven door was partly open. I pulled it all the way down.

  Whatever had been inside was mostly a big mass of fur and well-done entrails, but I was pretty sure it was a cat. Maybe two.

  I turned off the gas and shut the door.

  I still needed to see if there were any deceased Beckers lying around. I wet my f
ace again through the makeshift bandana and went to the bathroom, then the bedroom. Ransacked, but no human corpses. Yet the smell of death seemed to intensify, and there were flies near my upended futon.

  I waded in through dresser drawers and clothes pulled from my closet. I tugged the futon to one side.

  I had to get out.

  In the garden, I tore off the bandana, and couldn’t even talk to Elle, who had moved over into the shade under my landlords’ prize orange tree.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Stay over there. I probably reek of it.”

  She did.

  “I think I found it.”

  “What?”

  “They trashed it good.”

  “What?”

  “I have to go back in. I’ll bring it out.”

  I took a few fresh breaths and re-tied the bandana on my way through the door. I went to the kitchen closet and pulled out several trash bags. I tore one apart and used it for gloves. Then I opened the oven door again.

  Definitely cats. Gutted. I pulled out the entire metal rack on which they had been piled and dumped it all into one of the garbage bags. Intestinal cord and blood were seared into the bottom of the oven. I pulled a wooden spoon from a clay pot next to the stove and scraped out as much as I could, lumped it into the bag. Then I put that bag inside another, and tied it all up.

  I closed the oven door again and headed back to the bedroom with another garbage bag. This time it was a raccoon, also gutted, inside a clear plastic bag with a hole cut in it so that the swollen entrails would fester and pop, amplifying the stench.

  I double-bagged it, too—carefully, so that the body wouldn’t fall apart on me like that woman’s corpse in Dallas when I was covering the cops. My eyes were watering so much I could barely see. A breeze had started to drift in from the southeast through the open windows and doors but it was still plenty humid.

  I carried both black plastic sacks outside.