South, America

by Rod Davis

  “Amen,” he said. “Amen.”

  She was looking at him steadily, not crying. He had not let go of her hands.

  “But they were okay then, when they died. Mama and Daddy.”

  “They got over all that years ago. Last time I spoke to Pearl, after your daddy was gone and before she found out she was sick, she was so happy. She just talked about you, about your brother.”

  He let go of her hands and glanced at the clock on his desk. “I hate to say this, but I have to be at a meeting in fifteen minutes over in the Tremé. Folks trying to figure out the mayor’s race. Kind of thing I have to show up at.”

  Elle stood up, clutching the folder. “I know we kept you.”

  He rose and I did, too. “It was no problem. I hope it was a help.”

  We shook hands. Then he hugged Elle, like a father would a daughter, and walked us to the outer door.

  “I’m always here, Good Lord willing. You can come back any time and we can talk more. You go visit your priest, too. You keep close to God either way.”

  33

  Something other than hewing to the spiritual path was going through my mind as we pulled away and crossed the Ninth Ward. I didn’t want to go back to my place or even deal with it, and instead drove along the lakeside edge of the Quarter on Ramparts, also dense and complex—maybe the whole city was—aimlessly heading Uptown. The chaos that had enveloped our lives was but a part of a history whose entanglements seemed to have neither beginning nor end.

  I played dodge-car down Poydras to Magazine and then a slow two-lane drift toward Audubon Park, past the antique shops and bars and cafes, laundries, coffee shops, throngs of people gathering at watering holes, street corners filled with people waiting for the next bus, cop cars, miscreants waiting for their moment.

  Just past Jackson, I slowed and pulled into a space by the curb. I told her I was tired of driving to nowhere and she said she was, too. Neither of us wanted to go back to Boots’s, it wasn’t Elle’s week for the timeshare, and my apartment was uninhabitable. I suggested we go back downtown and stay the night at a boutique hotel I knew a couple blocks from Canal. Let tomorrow take care of itself. She was for it.

  I let a valet take the car and carry up our bags, including the duffel with the sidearms, watching that he left the shotgun case. We got a sixth-floor room with a decent view, giant bed, and bathroom with a tiled shower and spa-sized tub. We went down to the bar, found a quiet corner and split a bottle of California cabernet. We nibbled at cheese and crackers as the early autumn sun faded outside and business types began to filter in to lay siege to the evening.

  That was no good, so we took the elevator to our room to sort through our things. We didn’t want a restaurant so I called room service. I turned on the wall-mounted Panasonic TV, found nothing, and then tuned in jazz on the stainless steel Sony radio on an adjacent shelf. Billie Holliday. We ate our sandwiches and drank our bottled water without hurry at a bleached pine table by the window. We watched the city below. It was cloudy, but you could see the lights toward the river, Gretna on the other side. We watched the night settle.

  “It’s good to be back,” she said.

  The city looked back in at us, filled us with its longing. She pushed back her chair, came to me. She kissed me, the taste of tuna and beef and grapes mingling on our tongues. She smiled and said she wanted a bath. I thought that sounded fine. When I heard the water running, I flipped on the TV to scan the news, but it remained of no interest. I turned it off and turned the sound back up on the radio. In the tub, she sang along to “Strange Fruit.”

  She came out drying her hair and wrapped in an oversized white towel. I told her she smelled good and she said the music sounded good and I went in for a shower. We could have done all that together, but it didn’t need remarking.

  When I came out, she was still in her towel and I was in mine and then we weren’t. We fell on the bed. My ribs and nose still hurt but she didn’t care.

  There wasn’t much foreplay. She lay back and told me she wanted me in her, fast. It was not athletic, nor rough, nor even lustful. I would describe it as what the Buddhists call mindful. Aware of everything: every feeling, every thought, every ounce of ourselves contained in the other. Another word would be love. We made love. Another word would be “coda.”

  In the morning, we lay next to each other on the tangled and sweat-stained sheets. Dawn through the edges of the drawn curtains threw a narrow beam across her thighs.

  “You snored a little.”

  “Sorry.” I touched my nose.

  “Still sore?”

  “Somebody roughed me up during the night.”

  She turned on her side, ran her arm up my torso, kissed the corners of my lips. I loved her breath, her touch, her face, everything. In her eyes was everything I wanted. But I knew it wasn’t going to be.

  “A whole day coming up with no one chasing us,” she said.

  I turned on my side to face her.

  “In my job, we would say it hasn’t sunk in,” she went on.

  “That the technical term with shrinks?”

  Her eyes were so perfect they were almost unbearable. She wasn’t smiling.

  “I mean, it’s just . . . trying make sense of it.”

  I let my head drop to the pillow.

  “It was all so so fast,” she said. “I don’t mean us. Or this. I mean everything else.”

  She rolled onto her back, looking not at the ceiling but through it, through the building, through the cap of the solar system.

  “It’s like something is scratching inside my brain and I can’t make it stop.”

  I rolled on my back, too. “It’ll go away. Pretty much.”

  She knew I was lying.

  “I just have to say it.”

  “So say it.”

  She kept examining the ceiling. The brush pattern was very interesting. Asian, perhaps. “Okay . . . look . . . I have to be by myself for a while. I can’t be with anyone. Especially you.”

  I knew it was coming—had to—but that didn’t make the knowing easier. I looked for some words. “It was what we had to do. It was a lot to do.”

  “I understand that. Logically. Just not in here.” She touched her chest with her hand, patted it. For a long time. “Not in here.”

  I looked for some more words. “We can get to Birmingham by mid-afternoon. We can get your car.” I mean, wasn’t being a man with a plan what I was all about?

  She took my hand. Held it while I didn’t talk anymore. “Yeah.”

  Then I did. “We could stop by your place in Tuscaloosa on the way.”

  Her grip tightened.

  “Or I could just fly from here,” she said.

  “Or, yeah, that.”

  “It might be easier that way, you know?”

  “I guess.”

  “Jack. Don’t.”

  What a pair. I let go her hand and sat up. I tucked my head against my knees.

  “Not after all this. Don’t go that way now, baby,” she said. It’s not fair.”

  I felt a sound come from my chest but it was not a word.

  “What?”

  “I said, all right.”

  She sat up, too, swiveled around and scooted up to me. She caressed my shoulder.

  “I’m not running away from you.”

  I pulled my head up from my knees. “No.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know.”

  “Kiss me.”

  I did.

  “And you know, I have to find out about Rose.”

  34

  It took a month to move it all forward, but the time went fast. I went back to my apartment but couldn’t stay because of the stench. After throwing out most of my old stuff, I ended up going back to Boots’s apartment for a week while I had my place fumigated and painte
d.

  The Beckers returned from their vacation and I told Art there’d been some trouble over a woman but that I couldn’t talk about it just yet. I said I’d naturally pay for any damages. That seemed to cover it for both of us in a city where sometimes a polite stretching of the truth was both expected and appreciated. Other than to ask me how I was feeling, we never spoke of it again.

  When I did move back in, the only odor was a fake mountain pine scent. I ordered a new gas stove and it arrived, and then everything else new, futon to window screens. I got a new laptop off the Internet, and found a zafu through a health food store bulletin board. I found it impossible to meditate, but it was nice to know the cushion was there. It’s a sad commentary on your own state of enlightenment when you can’t find the time to try to achieve it, but my mind was locked into a set of gears that would be turning for quite a while, and in fact had been turning most of my life. I stocked up on food but took almost all my meals out. Where there were people, noises, distractions—evidence of a world of separate existence.

  In the next week, I dabbled with some travel pieces for which I had lost all interest. I sent a follow-up to a magazine on the story about that Nigerian carpenter. I called Ray Oubre and told him we’d have to talk soon. He asked me if I wanted to do a late-night tail on a wandering spouse in the Garden District. I needed the money, but said I was busy the next couple of weeks. He wanted to get a drink. I put him off. He wasn’t mad but he wasn’t stupid. I knew he’d want to know what was going on, and maybe he would be the right person to tell. Sometime.

  I talked to Elle only twice.

  She had picked up her car in Birmingham, put the hefty parking fee on her credit card—our cards had gotten workouts of late—and driven back to Tuscaloosa. She said she had been afraid at first to walk inside her house but as soon as she pulled up in the driveway she realized that after what she’d been through, nothing much would scare her.

  The house had been tossed all right, but nobody had left any rotting creatures. Cleaning it up gave her something to keep herself busy well into that first evening home, after which she fell asleep on her couch and didn’t wake up until the phone rang the next morning. It was her answering service, wanting her to clear two weeks’ calls.

  It took a few days to set her absence straight with the university. She explained that she had needed extra time to take care of her brother’s affairs. They were very supportive.

  She said everyone at the clinic was, too. She said she didn’t look forward to turning in her notice, and was very concerned about some of her clients, the young women and single moms, including the contract patients in New Orleans. She was trying to find them replacement counseling. I told her not to worry, that she had other things on her mind.

  She said she thought she was “functioning normally within the psychological circumstances” and that I probably was, too. She said we needed time to come to terms with our actions, our thoughts. She said it was like soldiers coming home. The ones after World War II returned on ships and had time to reintegrate themselves. In Vietnam and since, it was by air. One day your job is to kill people and the next morning you’re supposed to pretend that was just a passing phase. She said I probably already knew that. I did.

  She said she knew she was talking like a shrink. She was right. But the talking was good. She said that we had become our own triage therapists. It was meant as a joke.

  At night I missed her; also days, walking through the Quarter. After a couple of weeks, I took on some work for Ray. We had that drink and I gave him the Cliff’s Notes on what had happened, under his oath of confidentiality. He knew some wise guys and that Big Red was an enforcer for the Francosis. He thought I would be okay. He thought it might even be good for business, having survived. I believe he was actually impressed. He thought I should just do P.I. work for him from now on, maybe even get a license. I said I’d give it some thought.

  Most nights I hung out at Berto’s, sometimes at the Urban Bayou, but it wasn’t the same. Other than coming home shit-faced a couple of times, I didn’t even feel like going out. At heart, I wasn’t a George Jones drown-your-sorrows kind of guy.

  What kind of guy was I?

  I missed her.

  Truth is, it took something out of me. “It” being her and them and everything that had connected us, from Terrell’s corpse to the screwdriver in Trey’s chest. I didn’t want to admit it. No one ever does. First time someone tried to kill me, on a rice paddy dike outside Incheon, something got taken out then, too. But it was different. You don’t care about an infiltrator trying to blow you up, because it’s his job. He can take away some sense of permanence and immortality and put fear of unexpected death it its place, but it’s a righteous fear and you can handle it. You can shoot him in the throat, too, and handle that. I got it, but, once again, the getting it wasn’t enough. Maybe that’s what I didn’t want to admit. That not every riddle has an answer. Can be fixed. That the mystery can come from a bee sting, a bullet, a kiss. That it remains mysterious. That life is.

  She began to call more often, a few times a week. I couldn’t tell if she was keeping me up-to-date or just talking because she missed me, too. It didn’t matter.

  A week after her birthday, she went to the lawyers in Jackson. The attorney for the estate, a old Mississippi liberal type, Cornelius Weathers, said he had been surprised, having wondered if she would ever turn up. The wax-sealed birth certificate was acceptable, and he went over the details of the estate, in effect the “second will” left by Junior Barnett. The holdings had been kept in a hollow trust, its funds administered by a brokerage company hired by the firm, with some commissions deducted and duly recorded. Weathers had been a boyhood friend of Junior’s and felt it his duty to keep everything strictly in order.

  Elle would indeed receive half the assets, after which the other half could be released to Trey. Which raised the question of his whereabouts. By then, he had been declared missing. The Times-Picayune had run a positive review of his Red Dog collection, noting that the Delta Gallery’s part-time staffer, Weldon Greenbriar, had been unable to locate the artist and thought he might have gone to Europe unexpectedly, as he sometimes did. All the paintings had sold and were expected to increase in value, just as Elle had said. I thought about visiting the gallery. I never did.

  Elle said Mr. Weathers didn’t care much for Trey, but felt that his responsibility was to fulfill the terms of the will, so the firm had stayed in touch with the NOPD after the missing persons report became public. Nor did anything more come of the shelved investigation of Terrell’s murder. Officially.

  Just before Thanksgiving, she called to tell me that $5.9 million had been transferred to a new investment account set up for her in a Jackson bank. The estate’s worth of $12 million (after legal fees and tax reserve) was less than the $30 million Trey had estimated, but Weathers said various global market recessions, the lingering effects of the oil bust, and some “risky investments” had cut into the portfolio. She said she hadn’t pressed for details.

  Still, not bad. And if no one heard from Trey in a year, and he were declared legally dead, she would receive the balance. Until then, his share would remain in a separate account from the original trust.

  She had dinner with her aunt the night of the official opening of her account at a French restaurant in North Jackson. She said they talked about how everything around her would change—yet again. She said Lenora had healed fine and would get the plastic surgery on her fingers soon. Lenora had given her another cleansing bath and she had been to mass a couple of times. She said she missed me.

  They drove to Rosedale in December and put Artula’s house on the market and set up for her to move to Jackson for better treatment for her and for the baby, Vanessa. Elle got her lawyers to create an account for Artula that would roll over to the children when the time came. Elle promised to become their guardian. Artula thought she had about two more year
s.

  Elle bought a new house near downtown Tuscaloosa, worked when she could. Her patients in New Orleans were referred to another counselor. New Orleans was the place she most wanted to go and the one place that, for now, she couldn’t.

  The second week in December, a couple days after my birthday, I went to my bank to withdraw some cash and deposit checks from Ray and from Southern Focus. The drive-through clerk seemed exceptionally friendly and made a comment that this had been a good day for me so far. The pneumatic tube sent me my deposit receipt. Instead of $5,453, which I had expected, it was $205,453.

  I called Elle right away. When I objected, she said that if she was going to have to give that much to Big Red, she could do the same for me.

  I tried to celebrate that night but couldn’t get past the first Jack Daniels at the Napoleon House, and had to walk around through the crisp cold night, unable to stop or sit. She had handed me everything I needed to start up whatever I wanted.

  She had given me my freedom.

  Shortly before Christmas, she called to ask if I’d heard from Big Red. I hadn’t. An exact date for the payoff had never been set, but she said she thought he was probably getting anxious and she wanted to get him his money and be done with it, before New Year’s Eve. I said Red was the kind of guy who would let me know if the payment were overdue. She asked if I could come get the cash and deliver it to him in person right away.

  I drove up to Tuscaloosa that same day and got in about seven. It was dark and cold in Alabama but her house was warm and clean and she greeted me with a kiss and a hug. She was beautiful as ever. Eyes, still, to die for.

  She explained her plan to pick up the money at the bank in the morning. We went to dinner at an Italian place near campus, but the conversation was muted and the wine went down badly. It wasn’t until we got back to her house that we talked about the past. Or tried. I couldn’t get to the heart of anything because she wouldn’t let me.

  I stayed the night, sharing the bed but nothing more. Eventually it was dawn. I turned on a space heater and read the paper while she got ready for work. Lots of troubled patients over the holidays needed her help.